Tips to eliminate mosquitoes around your property this spring

If you’re swatting more mosquitos than usual this spring, you’re not alone. Thom Bourne from Mosquito.Buzz with Nutrilawn shares tips on dealing with them.

Ottawa residents are being urged to clear standing water from their property to help swat mosquitoes, following heavy rain on Monday and Tuesday morning.

Mosquitoes need water to breed, and public health and companies say the number one thing to do is to reduce or eliminate areas or objects that can accumulate water and help breed mosquitoes.

The common sources of mosquitoes at your home include open garbage, wagons and toys, fountains, tires and tire swings on the property, pet water bowls, buckets and barrels and neglected pools.

Ottawa Public Health offers other tips to eliminate mosquitoes around your property:

• Empty containers and receptacles regularly and turn them over when not in use
• Drill holes in the bottom of recycling containers so water can drain out
• Clean clogged roof gutters, remove leaves and debris that may prevent drainage of water
• Ensure all openings to rain barrels are covered with screen mesh at all times
• Turn over plastic wading pools and wheelbarrows when not in use
• Change the water in birdbaths at least once per week
• Use landscaping to eliminate standing water that collects on your property

“The mosquitoes are far worse,” Thom Bourne of Mosquito.Buzz from Nutrilawn, told CTV Morning Live.

“Mosquitoes need water to breed and guess what, this is the season. We’re getting rain and rain and then heat and then rain, and mosquitoes love that weather.”

• ‘Mosquitoes are just out of control’: Ottawa pest control company doubles treatment for some areas

Bourne says the biggest problem for mosquitoes is that people are not clearing the standing water off their properties.

“If they can do that, then they’re going to get less mosquitoes on their property,” Bourne said Tuesday morning. “In other words, all these little things that people leave, like kids’ toys and buckets. When you look at these things after a rainfall and you look down in them and you start to see these wiggly things in the water, that is mosquito larvae.”

Mosquito.Buzz from Nutrilawn offers tips to eliminate mosquito breeding grounds on your property.

“Cutting down some of the higher foliage that’s there. When you let the grass grow too long, you let the shrubs get out of control – all of these things are habitat for the mosquitoes and they’ll just go and breed in those particular areas,” Bourne said.

Mosquito.Buzz from Nutrilawn offers services in the Ottawa area to control the mosquito population on your property.

“We can get the mosquitos on your property. We come in a couple of times and build a perimeter/barrier for the mosquitoes. And then what we do is come back every 21 days to make sure that’s reinforced,” Bourne said.

“All Health Canada approved products and we, certainly, leave instructions for our customers to say when they can and can’t go out on the property.”

Bourne adds the products have an agent that will stick the treatment to the foliage in your yard and “it’s good for about 21 days.”

“With the weather that we’re having, people are not going to be able to enjoy their yards,’ Bourne said. “With the service that we have, we come in (and) take care of them, come back a second time making sure the perimeter is there and then, of course, you can use your yard during Canada Day.”