City of Regina trying to keep mosquitoes at bay

This summer has been horrible when it comes to mosquitoes.

The month of June saw more mosquitoes caught in city traps than ever before in that same month.

Russell Eirich, the City of Regina’s manager of open space services, says July is looking like much of the same.

“People are going to start to notice that the mosquitoes are becoming a little more problematic right now and that’s just a reflection of the weather we’ve had over the last couple of weeks,” Eirich said during Wednesday’s Greg Morgan Morning Show with guest host Kevin Martel.

The rain in Regina has been bountiful in parts of July, including on July 19 when around 60 millimetres fell in a 12-hour span.

The abundance of moisture then, and in the rainy evenings since, has made for perfect breeding grounds for the pesky little bugs.

“We’re trapping 107 mosquitoes per trap and our historical average should be about 41 mosquitoes for traps, so we’re significantly higher,” Eirich said. “That said, it could be a lot worse.

“July has had as many as 4,000 mosquitoes per trap back in the ’90s, so we’re at least still well below that.”

City crews continue to spray bodies of water throughout the city using VectoBac, which is an organic product that only targets mosquito larvae.

The city is also reminding residents to do their part by dumping things out that hold water to eliminate places where eggs can hatch.

It’s not just mosquitoes seeing a jump in numbers, according to Eirich. Wasps are having a busy summer as well.

“I definitely think it’s a little bit of a worse year for wasps,” Eirich said. “I expect by the time we start to get closer to that Labour Day weekend, they’re going to be a lot more problematic.

“By then, we’ll probably be able to confirm numbers, how many requests for service, that sort of stuff.”

Wasps made an earlier appearance than usual in Saskatchewan.

In June, Poulin’s Pest Control confirmed an increase in calls for service than years prior.

Shawn Sherwood with the pest control service said it was looking like there could be more stings than usual this summer.

“We’re seeing that (wasps) are coming out earlier. People are seeing them a lot sooner than they would normally expect,” Sherwood said. “It has a lot to do with the type of spring that we had, where we have finally had a reasonably dry spring and that allowed the juvenile queens to have lower-than-normal mortality over the winter months and into the spring.

“It’s looking like there is going to be a lot of them.”