Question: Mosquitoes are eating us alive. What will control them safely? We’d like to be able to clear the area before we have friends over on the patio.

Answer: If you remember your biology classes, mosquitoes must have standing water for the early part of their life cycle. Start by eliminating any pools, puddles or containers of water around your landscape and, where possible, in adjacent public land. You can also use conventional insecticides to eliminate the adults, but you’ll need to spray back beneath and behind shrubs and in quiet corners and groundcover beds. The mosquitoes stay where the air is still most of the time. You can use the vaporizing foggers to control them in a confined area. That’s probably what you would want to do several hours before you had guests. They leave very little odor compared to conventional insecticide sprays. However, with all the diseases mosquitoes are known to carry, your best line of defense will be a DEET repellent spray.