Geneva sets another round of mosquito spraying
Are mosquitoes nipping at you a bit too much lately?
You can thank the rainy August we had.
That's why Geneva is getting an extra blast of bug spray this week, and maybe later again this month.
"The mosquitoes are a lot worse than normal," Geneva Public Works Director Dan Dinges said Tuesday.
The city council Tuesday night approved spending another $11,356 for two more sprayings of chemicals to kill adult mosquitoes.
The first dose could happen this week. Trucks will mist the town in the middle of the night.
What's biting us now are mostly floodwater mosquitoes, also called nuisance mosquitoes. The chemicals will kill them and their cousins, the culex mosquitoes that carry the West Nile Virus.
Dinges hopes one or two sprayings will make the situation tolerable until the first frost, which interrupts the breeding cycle.
Floodwater mosquitoes lay their eggs on the ground and wait for it to get wet. All that rain in August, especially the storm Aug. 23, made more areas active. (Culex mosquitoes prefer to lay eggs in warm, stagnant water, like that in buckets, birdbaths and old tires in your yard.)
Wait 7 to 10 days, and …
"They are going nuts right now," Dinges said.
The city tries to kill mosquitoes before they grow up by treating catch basins and open water areas (such as detention ponds) with chemicals that kill the mosquito larvae. "But when you get a huge area that gets flooded, you get water where you don't normally," Dinges said.
The city contracts, as do many other towns, with Clarke Outdoor of Roselle to do the spraying. Typically, Clarke bunches up treatment in the Tri-Cities so Batavia, Geneva, St. Charles, Batavia Township, Geneva Township and St. Charles Township are sprayed at the same time. St. Charles is scheduled for Wednesday, according to Laura McGowan, spokeswoman for Clarke Mosquito Control.
There's one upside to all the nuisance mosquitoes attacking us now: "It's encouraging people to put on mosquito protection," McGowan said, meaning they are less likely to be bit by the disease-carrying culex.