City Has Not Forsaken Mosquito Spraying

I woke just before dawn last Wednesday to a buzzing sound that was not our alarm clock.

I hate buzzing sounds in the morning. It is almost always the aforementioned alarm clock, but once or twice the buzzing has been a mosquito that has snuck into our house and found us asleep in bed.

Considering that my wife is the mosquito version of catnip, this is DEFINITELY not a good thing.

It wouldn't matter if she were wrapped head to toe in Kevlar with just her nose poking out into the open. If a mosquito is anywhere nearby it will find and bite her on that square inch of available skin.

And while most people get an itchy welt when bitten by a mosquito, my wife gets an ITCHY WELT!!! In case you're wondering the exclamation points are part of the description. Yes, her welts are that bad.

If you think I exaggerate, I share with you this illustration:

A couple weeks ago we stopped by the Bel Air Grill in downtown Cape to have a couple of beers with some friends about sunset. I was wearing shorts, while my wife had on pants and sandals. There were no mosquitoes hovering around when we got there, but when we left about an hour later, my wife had been bitten 10 times on her ankles and even on the bottom of one foot. I had no bites at all.

Mosquitoes love her. They really, really love her.

However, in the case of this pre-dawn buzzing that woke me last Wednesday it was neither our alarm clock nor a marauding mosquito, but actually the city spraying for mosquitoes. Their spray truck sounds like a whole flock of mosquitoes that has just consumed a case of Red Bull.

It was the first time this summer that I'd heard the distinctive drone. I welcomed the sound. Since my wife is mosquito-nip I appreciate anything that helps keep the bloodsucker population down.

Prior to last Wednesday's buzz-by of my house, I asked some newspaper circulation department personnel who work in the wee hours of the morning and do a lot of driving around town during that time, if they had spotted the city spraying for mosquitoes.

In previous summers, they said they would often see the city fogging for mosquitoes after midnight. But this year, they only recalled seeing the sprayers a couple of times in the western parts of town.

Since these are just casual observations, I contacted the Cape Girardeau Public Works Department to find out the story. I thought that perhaps the City had changed its technique, forsaking sprays for citronella candles placed strategically around town.

But I apparently was wrong.

According to the city, they are still spraying. Obviously, a spray truck went by my house last Wednesday. However, they are spraying less than they have in previous years. They now spray two nights a week -- Wednesday and Thursday -- rather than three.

The spray is a larvacide that controls baby mosquitoes before they become adults so any adult bloodsuckers are still going to hang around being pests until they die of old age or get squished by smacking hands or -- if they're lucky -- manage to hit their species' version of Mega-Millions and find my wife.

Without her Kevlar, of course.