Chemical for Mosquito Control

Any spray available from your nearer supermarket will work well.

The problem is that more mosquitos are grown and quickly replace the dead ones.

mosquitoes do not fly far from their water emergence point. If a neighbourhood carefully eliminates all still and standing water they can reduce the population a lot.

Eaves troughs with low spots can breed tens of thousands of mosqutoes over a summer. some tires lying flat or upright can also breed thousand of mosquitoes

water barrels, the same. You can place a few spoons of mineral oil or other oil on standing water to drown the larvae (who are unable to poke their breathing tube through the film). In some countries they have neighbourhood patrols with officers that go around and do this. This is done in malaria countries a lot. You can also spray sides of fences and buidings as mosquitoes like vertical resting areas.

Control? Then fumigation/fog (not sprays) is the only way.

The best? DDT, of course, but not too healthy and most places (where individuals have PC's and internet connections) it can't be obtained.

Best control (as opposed to merely killing individuals)? Keeping the insects out with well maintained screens--including over blower vents or any other access to the house.

Spraying? Fumigation is really impractical as a control method: costly and inconvenient; damage to property or labor intensive; doesn't last and requires unhealthy repetitive application.

Spraying? As in aerosols? As in knock them down one by one? Largely ineffective no matter the chemical--since mosquitos are among the best, if not the best, flyers in the insect phylum. They can actually fly through rain showers, evading raindrops as they go. In equal fashion they will be very difficult to get with (anything less than an excessive amount of) spray.

Exclusion--and, as said elsewhere, control of breeding habitat, as they don't range very far from where they emerge--is the best, most workable control. And, repellent on skin when out of doors.

Sorry, no panaceas for your problem. Let the stores keep the overpriced spray products for....the easily fooled.

Ceemical spray doesn't sound to healthy (for people ). Mosquitos home in on carbon dioxide given off by people -helps them to find dinner. Not breathing would be drastic , but you can get devices that lure the beasties and kill them (powered by calor) by freezing. I've seen 1 weeks haul catch 1 pound (=1 million mossies) in Scotland. You could place a few of said gadgets near the house entrance .Alternatively the forestry workers up there all use a product supplied by a well known home-direct retailer , it's marketed as a skin softening spray! Also it's only females that bight , but I don't suppose that's much help apart from allowing some of us a few risque jokes.

In the home, provided all open windows are covered with nets to stop (reduce!) the numbers of mosquitos, the best way is to have several of these special mosquito UV lamps that draw them onto a ring of high voltage wires and fry them!! Sometimes the 'POP' is quite loud as a Mosquito is annialated!! I have used such lamps for about 20 years with complete success.

Camping shops can be a good source of both 12 volt and 230 volt versions in europe, I suspect the USA would be similar except for the fact that 110 volts are more normal!!

A further plus point is that house flies are also attracted and killed by the lamps as well!!

Do not use these lamps outside as they also kill good bugs amd moths/Butterfly etc......anything attracted to the light in fact!!

We have far more mosquitos here in Spain than I ever encountered living in well regulated towns in Africa where prevention was the norm. Recent studies as has been mentioned show that DDT inside the dwelling is the most effective killer, but not available in over regulated nations. We don't find the blue lamp hi volt method very effective for our mossies which seem to vary in size at different times of the year. We are dreeading the arrival of the tiger which is making its was down the coast. We use also the electronic hi voltage tennis bats but again some mossies are adept at jumping away as you cover them as I think they sense the field, so have had more success by turning the bat on at the last moment.

I read that one attractant used in USA was a type of cheese (whose name I'd not come across) and was tempted to substitute the blue lamp by a good smelly French cheese.

Try one of these:

http://www.mosquitomagnet.com/store_locator/dealers/Default.aspx

They really work!

"Try one of these:http://www.mosquitomagnet.com/store_locator/dealers/Default.aspx They really work!"

Just fine outdoors.

NOT for indoors use as it will attract all the neighbors skeeters into your house!

"I am trying to determine if anyone has experience with mosquito control. What is the most effective chemical spray to kill mosquitos in a home? Where is it available?"

"QUICK HENRY, THE FLIT" :-)

...the ones we had worked in both Italy and Greece in the summer months perfectly (similar latitude, same Mossies), I think that you had the wrong type of lamp with only a blue painted bulb instead of a proper UV tube!!! They do not work well at all!!

Nothing gets away from the ones we use........!!! and they are relatively cheap too!!!!

DEET

What does DEET mean?

"What does DEET mean?"

It is a brand name of diethyltoluamide which is consider to be a very safe product to repel mosquitos.

You will find the manufacturers web page at: http://www.deet.com/

"product to repel mosquitoes."

Yeah, I reread the OP and they want to kill the mosquitoes. DEET only repels, or reduces our attractiveness to mosquitoes.

To defeat your enemy you must know your enemy, i.e. learn a little about their biology.

Only female mosquitoes "bite." They do this because they need proteins from our blood to lay eggs. So if you can keep them from ingesting protein you can keep them from reproducing, which IMHO is better than killing the mature generation.

Another very good solution as posted here earlier is to rid your area of standing, stagnant water. Without stagnant water pools mosquitoes are unable to reproduce. If you see a bucket with a bunch of tiny little shrimp-like swimming larvae dump it out right away, those are mosquito larvae.

Check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito

DEET is the sound a mosquito makes, just stretch it with a falsetto tone...

and this too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEET

Thanks for the info, I do not think that DEET is for sale in Germany.....sadly!

It was black fly, black fly everywhere
A-crawlin' in your whiskers, a-crawlin' in your hair
A-swimmin' in the soup, and a-swimmin in the tea
Oh the devil take the black fly and let me be

— The Black Fly Song" — Hemsworth Wade

TORONTO (GlobeinvestorGOLD) — Ah, the Canadian summer! Hordes of people making the weekend trek to the sylvan haunts of what Toronto folks like to call "up North" — by the way, folks, up North doesn't even start until you've hit Temagami, and that's still well south of '49, not to mention well south of a big whack of Michigan. Anyway, all the city folk will head up to Muskoka with their SUV's crammed full of citronella candles, mosquito coils, Costco-sized containers of Skin So Soft, citronella-impregnated clothing, and those useless electronic bug-zappers.

Take it from an old bush unit — none of that stuff works worth beans. Oh, it may discourage a handful of your effete, etiolated Muskoka mosquitoes, but where I come from the bugs are so bad that the moose run out of the woods to throw themselves in front of semi-trucks just to put themselves out of their misery. In my youth, I spent many a day sweating in the bush, with clouds of black flies swarming about my head and rivulets of blood trickling down behind my ears where the buggers had been gnawing away at me. Mind you, inhaling the little insects when they swarm up into your face is even worse.

The only effective prophylactic against the onslaught of this northern insect plague is good old Muskol or OFF!, with the active ingredient Di-ethyl Ethyl Toluene (DEET). Oddly enough, it's also quite effective as a paint remover. Slather yourself in Muskol, the strongest bug repellent known to man, and you can actually spend time in the bush in the summer without going insane.

Admittedly, the stuff leaves a rather nasty industrial aftertaste when it invariably gets in your mouth — that toxic tang of toluene — and it burns like the dickens if you get it in your eyes or in a scratch or cut, but since the alternative is slowly being eaten alive by black flies, I say pass me the goop. You get used to it — you even get to like it.

In my Wawa prospecting days, we could always tell the women in the local bar who were in town for some R&R from a tree-planting or exploration crew by the redolent essence of Muskol that wafted come-hither from them like pheromones. Proust may have used the scent of his Madeleines to stir his memory, but then, he's never been North of Superior.

Bug juice

Since this is the Summer Edition of Trade by Numbers, I thought I'd examine the investment potential of the makers of mosquito and black fly repellent. It's the essential Canadian summer product: it's gotta be a goldmine for whoever makes it.

OFF!, the "Deep Woods" kind as well as all its many permutations, is made by the SC Johnson Company, which is owned and operated by the SC Johnson family of Racine, Wisconsin. It describes itself as "a family company," with $5-billion (U.S.) in revenue, 12,000 employees, and sales in 110 countries around the world. Great company, but you can't buy the stock, which is a shame. There's only one way to participate: you'll have to marry a Johnson. They also make insect repellents based on picaridin, which is as good as the DEET in OFF! and Muskol at keeping mosquitoes and black flies off, also repels ticks, and won't strip paint. It is not yet sold in the U.S., but SC Johnson sells it widely in Europe and other countries. It is recommended by the World Health Organization, and the US Centers for Disease Control rates it as effective as DEET, but much more pleasant to use.

Muskol, on the other hand, is a fine product of Schering Canada, the domestic arm of pharma-giant Schering-Plough. Who knew?

Schering-Plough is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (currently around $20 a share, and down about 5 per cent year-to-date). It has 30,000 employees worldwide and, in the company's own words, "discovers, and develops, manufactures and markets advanced drug therapies to meet important medical needs." Well, keeping me from being drained by boreal bloodsuckers is definitely an important medical need!

In 2004, Schering generated $8.3-billion in sales, spent $1.6-billion on research and development, and lost $856-million. It has a choppy dividend history and currently pays 5.5 cents a quarter, 22 cents a year. Its biggest selling drug is Remicade, used to treat Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis. Remicade (generically, infliximab) is, for any science geeks in the audience, a monoclonal antibody that specifically targets and irreversibly binds to TNF-alpha, (tumor necrosis factor), which has been shown to play a role in that list of nasty diseases in the previous sentence. Over 634,000 people around the world take Remicade. The company has recently released the results from two Phase III clinical trials that showed the drug may also be effective in treating ulcerative colitis.

Please contact with me. Henryzhang1@hotmail.com

For interest, Singapore has regulations preventing the construction of temporary structures that allow water to stand for any significant period of time. Because of this, and despite the high temperatures and humidity to be endured on a daily basis, Singapore is mosquito- and malaria-free.

Pheromone traps attract the males and prevent mating so they die out through a lack of new lava being produced. No nasty chemicals and no need for electricity.

Those bug zappers have been found to cause the insects to burst and spray their insides all over the place as they super heat but not for long enoughb to kill the nasty bacteria they can carry.

I just thought you should know.

"Those bug zappers have been found to cause the insects to burst and spray their insides all over the place as they super heat but not for long enoughb to kill the nasty bacteria they can carry." (emphasis added)

In other words:

DON'T USE ELECTRIC BUG ZAPPERS AROUND PICNICS, BBQ's, OR FOOD ANYWHERE, ANY TIME.

It may not be significant in that the sample size was one. However that one mosquito flew in as I was sorting out a box of Russian water colour cakes and it promptly made a bee(?) line for the carmine red cake, landed and went proboscis down, just as if it had thought it was in a pool of bright red oxygenated blood. I t stayed long enough to be electocuted but without exploding so hopefully the paints won't be too contaminated.

However it may be that for daylight, carmine red would be an attractive lure.