There's a house in Warilla with a brand new west-facing deck that nobody sat on for an entire summer. By half five every evening it was unusable, and when they finally rang me in February they'd already worked out who was to blame: the lake. Fair enough too. Lake Illawarra is right there and the saltmarsh does produce mosquitoes in serious numbers.
Took me about ten minutes to find the real problem. Behind the shed, four of those black plastic pot saucers stacked and half full of rain, a wheelbarrow tipped the wrong way, and a corrugated roof drain that had sagged and was holding maybe two litres of water permanently. I scooped the barrow water into a white bucket and it was wriggling. Hundreds of larvae in a container you could tip out with one hand.
They still get mosquitoes off the lake on a still, humid evening. But the ones parked on the deck at dusk all night, every night? They were homegrown.
The two different mozzie problems
Worth knowing which one you've got, because the fix is completely different.
Around the estuary, the wetlands and the mangrove edges, the saltmarsh species come out in pulses tied to the tides and the moon. They travel, sometimes a few kilometres inland on a breeze. You cannot fix that on your own block, and anyone who tells you they can eliminate it is selling you something. Council and the health department monitor those populations across the state, and NSW Health's mosquito fact sheet covers the personal protection side, which for saltmarsh mozzies is genuinely the main line of defence.
The other one is the domestic container breeder, and it's the one people underestimate. Around here that's mostly the striped one with white banded legs that bites in the shade during the day and drives everyone inside at dusk. It doesn't want a wetland. It wants a cupful of water with some leaf matter in it, in the shade, close to a house full of people. Bromeliads, a blocked gutter, the bung hole in a boat trailer, a pot saucer, the fold in a pool cover, the tray under the fridge in the garage. It never needs to travel more than about a hundred metres, so if you're being bitten in your own yard the odds are very high you're breeding them yourself.
Egg to biting adult is roughly a week to ten days in our summer heat. That's why a yard can go from fine to unbearable in a fortnight after a wet spell.
The walk-around, done in July
This is the bit nobody does in January when they actually care about it, because in January they're busy being annoyed. Do it now while it's cold and there's nothing flying.
Get a torch and go around the block slowly, tipping things. What I find over and over on Illawarra properties: plant pot saucers (the single biggest offender, and people are attached to them), roof gutters with a low spot full of gum leaves, especially on the older places up under the escarpment where the trees hang over. Rainwater tanks with a perished or missing inlet screen. Kids' toys, buckets, the wheelbarrow, an esky lid. Boats and trailers that have sat since Easter. Old tyres. Pot plants standing in decorative outer pots that hold water you can't see. Bromeliads and other plants that hold water in the leaf axils, which you flush with a hose rather than remove. The pool that stopped being chlorinated when the pump died.
Anything you can't tip or drain permanently, screen it or seal it. Anything ornamental that has to hold water, a pond or a water feature, put fish in it or keep it moving. Still water is the whole problem.
None of that is glamorous and all of it works better than anything I can spray.
What a treatment actually does
Once the yard's tidied up, a treatment handles what's left, and it isn't a fog over the lawn.
Adult mosquitoes spend most of the day resting somewhere cool, dark and sheltered: the underside of dense shrubs, the shady side of a fence line, under the deck, in the ivy, behind the shed. We put a residual on those resting surfaces, and mosquitoes landing there through the day pick it up. Plus a larvicide in any water that has to stay, pond overflow, a tank sump, drain pits.
Expect it to hold for a few weeks to a couple of months, less through a run of wet weather, and expect it to knock numbers right down rather than produce a sealed bubble. If your neighbour's yard has six untipped pot saucers in it, you'll still cop some. Timing matters too: a treatment in late spring before numbers build is worth two in the middle of January, and if you've got a wedding or a party in the backyard, a week out is about right.
Tell us where the veggie patch and the pets are before we start, because we plan the placement around them. Same conversation we have on any general pest treatment.
Mosquitoes are also the pest people most often try to solve with hardware, so, briefly: citronella candles do almost nothing beyond arm's reach. Bug zappers kill moths and beetles and barely touch mosquitoes. Ultrasonic repellers do nothing at all. A cheap outdoor fan on the deck genuinely works, mosquitoes are weak fliers and won't hold a course in moving air.
If you want the yard sorted before summer rather than during it, get in touch. Winter's the right time for the container audit and early spring is the right time for the first treatment, which is roughly the same logic as catching wasp nests while they're still small. Details on the treatment are here: mosquito treatment, or give us a call and describe the yard.
Need a hand with this in your home? Get a free quote or call 0430 007 651.