By Geoff Smith (@smithco on Twitter)

Mosquito season looking normal so far

May 15, 2017 | 5:15 AM

LETHBRIDGE – Things could change. But at the moment an average mosquito season is shaping up.

Ron Esau, mosquito technician with the city’s parks department, said there are few pools around the city following the snow melt. But it’s getting into rainy season, and there’s still a lot of snow pack in the mountains that could leave standing water if it melts quickly and swells the rivers.

“Often times when it rains a lot, 10 days later you’ll have a lot of mosquitoes biting. It takes that amount of time and what we want to do is treat the mosquitoes early in the season,” Esau explained. He goes to known areas of standing water, armed with a bacteria called VectoBac that attacks the larvae, without harming birds or pets.

May, so far, hasn’t seen a lot of rain. Esau hopes that will shorten the season by reducing the amount of multiplication, of the mosquito population. The idea is to kill one mosquito now, which equates to killing thousands down the road.

“For one mosquito, after they get a blood meal they’ll lay about 200 eggs. And then rather than perish, they’ll go and get another blood meal and lay 200 more eggs,” he said. “So every two weeks or so you can have one mosquito laying all of these eggs. And if it happens that you have a rainy spring and things get out of hand the numbers can be just terrible by the time you get to July and August.”

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Esau said they’ve been able to reduce the population over the years to the point where there are fewer eggs in the spring. But some of the pests have already emerged.

“There’s some years, by Victoria Day weekend, where there’s many, many mosquitoes,” Esau explained. “If it happens that you don’t really get bitten by mosquitoes before Canada Day, then you know that the numbers shouldn’t escalate too badly.”

Cooler summers in recent years have reduced the numbers of culex tarsalis, the variety of mosquito that carries West Nile Virus. In addition, Esau added birds and humans have been building up an immunity. But he advises people not to become complacent, and to continue to take steps to avoid being bitten.

“What we want with the parks department, we want people to be outside enjoying our parks, enjoying their yards,” Esau said.

“It’s summertime. We want people to be outside.”