Mosquito, bug populations low due to dry weather

If there are things bugging you this spring, tiny pests probably aren’t one of them.

Due to the extremely dry conditions, mosquito counts are at very low levels — only two were caught in the city’s 12 traps last week.

“You just can’t get a better May for not having mosquitoes,” Russell Eirich, the City of Regina’s senior program manager for forestry, pest control and horticulture, said Tuesday.

“We’re really thrilled with that. One of the things that we’re seeing, though, is because it is so dry we’re actually starting to have to ramp down some of our mosquito crews, because it’s just not cost-effective for us to be actually out there.”

The extra workers will now go towards watering trees and helping fight the drought.

While most years would see the city bring out its spray trucks to combat cankerworms and tent caterpillars, that’s not the case this time.

“We’ve done our monitoring throughout April and we’ve actually found that the cankerworm populations have basically crashed inside the city,” Eirich said. “So has tent caterpillar populations, so we’re not going to actually field a city-wide spray program.”

The extremely cold winter Regina experienced hurt the eggs that were laid in the trees, specifically in February.

Residents who put bands around their trees are being asked to take them off to allow the trees to get more moisture.

But one critter is thriving in the drought conditions — gophers.

“We started at the beginning of April, and as of (Tuesday) we’ve treated something like 17,000 holes for gophers,” said Eirich. “We’re seeing a large number of service requests coming in so that’s going to be something we’re going to have to focus on throughout the summer.”

There’s also a possibility the grasshopper population could rise as well due to the drought conditions, which could spell trouble for farmers and their crops.

–With files from 980 CJME’s Joseph Ho