citronella works to an extent, but not always. we get them so bad around here that even with multiple citronella lamps and pots burning in a circle around us they will come in. heaven forbid if we get a flooding rain in june, you cannot go outside at dark the rest of the summer. the MOST effective way i have found, though not quite affordable yet, is a home spraying system which uses pyrethrium. the price is around 5k for my house, then 150-200 a month after that. but it works, not jus tfor mosquitos but ALL insects. and it is non toxic. the spray is just a natural extract from chrysanthemum or something, i can't remember exactly. you can turn the system off manually if you are going to be outside during a shcedule spray cycle, but even if you don't it won't hurt you.

As far as I am concerned, NO. You may want to look up (google) the chemicals they are putting on. Over time most cause cancer, nuerological damage, fertility issues organ damage, etc. herbicides and especially chemical pesticides are designed to make living things die or sterile. People are living things. you might want to check out organic alternatives, gardensalive.com is a pretty straight forward catalog. treated lawns are bad for dogs too, as they roll, lay on them, and eat them. Kids then cuddle with the dog, and so on. On a grander scale, all the chemicals are washed away into our water supply and rivers causing damage to the entire community. Sorry to come on strong, I had cancer once and feel that I will do anything to keep anyone else from the pain of that. I really feel that lawn chemicals serve no purpose what so ever, they actually sterilize the soil, the salts and chemicals kill all the microbacteria and other living things in the soil, so over time, you will need more and more for anything green to survive in your yard. I'm may be really granola, but once you read up on soil structure, it is really mindblowing what is going on under your lawn. It is one of the few things that makes me believe in intelligent design. Please read up and make a decision... Thanks, Harriet

Broadcast sprays with residual action (the only way they'd have any effect other than shortly after the actual spraying) are not benign. I know of nothing that targets only mosquitos so anything you use will also kill other, unintended, insects. (And potentially harm the birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and mammals that eat the poisoned, off-target insects.) Just because the company is owned by an entomologist doesn't necessarily mean he has much interest in live bugs, or a healthy environment. Indeed, one of the most lucrative career paths for entomologists is working for chemical companies devising new insecticides. I live (and work outdoors) in a buggy, ticky, rural area and there is no way I'd ever consider broad spectrum, residual sprays for my own comfort. Biting bugs can be miserable - you don't want to experience the sheer misery of black fly season on my northern NY farm - but there are ways to make them less annoying w/o adding to the chemical load in our world. Disrupting the environment by spraying makes it difficult for natural balance to exert itself and help mitigate the problem. More effective solutions such as neighborhood efforts to get rid of standing water everywhere make a bigger difference in the long run. I have lived in parts of the world where mosquitos carry deadly diseases and a huge difference happens when people change their behavior and discourage the conditions that promote mosquitos, even w/o sprays. Landscaping and environmental changes, protective clothing, head nets, screens, dumping water accumluations, fans, even the odious chemical-attractant mosquito killers (not ordinary bug zappers, which really don't work and kill many beneficial insects) are much better than insecticides which don't really work unless sprayed frequently at high levels. And at low levels are mostly ineffective but still extract a serious environmental cost on non-target organisms. Please consider some other remedies before the dubious, and enviromentally costly, quick fix of spraying. Your worries about your dog's safety are laudable, but what about the other animals that live on or near your property whose much-smaller body masses makes them even more vulnerable to the sprays. You not proposing to keep all the birds, squirrels, bunnies, turtles, snakes, fish, etc., safely inside your house on spray-days, are you? L.

Attracting natural mosquito predators is what worked for us. We have a small river channel behind our property that gets shallow in dry periods, countless ponds and swampy areas in our neighborhood etc. Attracting mosquitoes to come fly in traps could go on forever and would end up in a lot if $ on replacement inserts in my area lol. It would probably work okay for people who dont have an endless supply of mosquitoes. *Dragonflies are really great. The adults eat the adults and babies/nymphs eat mosquito larvae..Its a double whammy. Many of the mosquitoes that cause the worse diseases are daytime biters. Dragonflies are good at eliminating these. I absolutely will not spray anything that would ever harm the Dragonflies. I think communities with high populations of daytime biting Aedes aegypti mosquitoes which cause Zika, Dengue, Chickungunya, etc should be planning and incorporating Dragonflies into their defense/prevention strategies. Obviously, in an emergency or outbreak they had to mass spray, which is the right thing to do but starting some prevention measures can work long term because pesticides aren't good for people, animals, or natural predators. Who knows what the long term effects of spraying everything and everyone from the ground and air every summer will be! Plus, keep on spraying those mosquitoes, and they will become resistant to pesticides so the pesticides will eventually need to become more toxic and that is a nasty cycle. *Bats are really great for getting the night time biters. *Little treefrogs will eat nightime female biters but will also eat the male mosquitoes that mate with the female biters. The males are attracted to highly scented night blooming flowers like brugmansia, jasmines, nycanthes arbor-trystis, stock, nicotiana, and white moon flower vine (Ipomea alba) etc. Male mosquitoes feed on nectar and don't typically feed on human blood. The males live about a week whereas the females can live up to 2 weeks with the main goal of mating, blood feeding, and laying eggs. I have tons of these kinds of flowers in my yard and the little tree frogs actually sit in the flowers and wait for their dinners. They stay nice and fat :) Thry obviously are eating more that just mosquitoes. Im sure they eat up some of my hummingbird moths and other moths but they are worth it. Its all about balance in nature. More needs to be done to save these little green tree frogs but that's another can of worms. Between the frogs, bats, and dragonflies we hardly have had any mosquitoes biting us in the last 3 yrs. When we first moved here we could hardly go outside especially in the evenings or cloudy days. Now I can go out and enjoy my night garden which I am thankful for because I have so many night blooming flowers. I'm not really seeing any day biting mosquitoes at all now. *Fish can also be used to eat mosquito larvae. The flying mosquitoes won't be caught unless the land on the surface of the water but fish can put a dent in the mosquito population. I am not using fish as a defense right now but have a little patio pond and the fish in there eat lots of bugs and any larvae that end up in their pond lol. Here are some types of Dragonflies found in Florida. https://www.insectidentification.org/insects-by-type-and-region.asp?thisState=florida&thisType=Dragonfly%20or%20Damselfly ~Sjn