The only proven methods for repelling mosquitoes are protective clothing and controversial chemical repellants.
Mosquitoes have been on Earth for over 100 million years. There are more than 3,000 different species, over 170 in North America alone. They live in every climate zone and are a global problem. More people die worldwide from mosquito-borne diseases than from any other single factor. There are many anecdotal accounts about what repels mosquitoes, such as eating garlic or bananas, taking B-12 vitamins, devices that emit sound and many others however, none of these has been scientifically proven. The only thing proven to repel mosquitoes is a repellent containing DEET, which presents a controversial health risk to humans.
Life Cycle
Mosquitoes breed in standing water. A single female mosquito can produce 1,000 to 3,000 offspring in her lifetime, laying between 100 to 300 eggs at a time. It takes from 4 to 7 days for a mosquito to go from egg to adulthood. A female mosquito can live up to 100 days while the male lives for only 10 to 20 days.
Feeding
Only female mosquitoes eat blood, not for their own nourishment, but for the development of their eggs; and human blood is not their blood of preference. They actually prefer herbivorous mammals or birds. Some even prefer frogs. When females bite, they stab two tubes into the skin, one to inject a blood-clotting inhibiting enzyme and the other to suck blood as if through a straw. The itchy red welt that appears on the skin from a mosquito bite is actually an allergic reaction to the mosquito's saliva. Their actual diet consists of nectar from flowers, fruit sugars and decaying matter.
Habitat
Mosquitoes live all over the world. Vast populations even live in the Arctic Circle. They can set up home almost anywhere: discarded containers, woodland pools, holes in trees, irrigation ditches, even salt marshes but they do need standing water to breed.
General Characteristics
Mosquitoes vary in size from one-eighth to three-quarters of an inch in length. The mosquito has poor eyesight. Their compound eyes are arranged in a spherical arrangement that contains many blind spots from eye to eye. Males find female mosquitoes by the sound of their wings beating. They can differentiate between male and female mosquitoes because the beating of a female's wings has a higher pitch than that of a male's. Mosquitoes have antennae tipped with extremely sensitive thermal receptors. These allow the mosquito to detect blood near the surface of an animal's skin from 10 feet away -- and this distance increases threefold in high humidity.
Carriers of Disease
The diseases mosquitoes carry have a disproportionate effect on children and the elderly in developing countries. Out of the more than 3,000 species of mosquitoes, most human diseases are carried by just three species: anopheles mosquitoes carry malaria, elephantiasis (filariasis) and encephalitis; culex mosquitoes carry encephalitis, elephantitus and the West Nile Virus; aedes mosquitoes carry yellow fever, dengue and encephalitis.
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