Mosquito Control
The Mosquito Control Bureau supports programs and services to control the mosquito population in addition to treatment of private property.
Request Mosquito Yard Inspection and Services
To request yard inspections and services from the Mosquito Control Bureau please call (757) 385-1470.
A Mosquito Control Bureau employee will visit your property and inspect the yard for any breeding sites and adult mosquitoes.
Areas that are breeding mosquitoes will be identified and eliminated, if possible. The inspector will also provide you with an informational pamphlet about mosquitoes and ways for homeowners to control mosquitoes on their property. If adult mosquitoes are found active during the visit the inspector can treat the area and give you information on ways that you can control any further problems.
You will need to be present and sign a consent form before any treatments occur. This treatment service is for one application between May and October.
To learn where nighttime mosquito spraying will occur, call (757) 385-1590 (updated daily at 3 p.m.) or check the mosquito spraying map.
Mosquito Life & Treatment Cycles
Mosquitos have four stages in their life cycle: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. The first three stages occur in water, which is why managing or treating stagnant water is so important in controlling the mosquito population.
Mosquitos breed in tree holes and artificial containers (like buckets, flowerpots, bird baths, clogged rain gutters, uncovered boats, and unchlorinated pools) that catch and hold water for over one week.
The Mosquito Control Bureau performs different types of proactive and reactive maintenance over the course of the year: testing, adulticiding, ditch maintenance, and larviciding.
The Mosquito Control Bureau tracks adult mosquito populations, tests mosquitoes, and tests sentinel chicken blood for the presence of mosquito-borne diseases.
The most common mosquito-borne diseases found in Virginia include West Nile Virus (WNV), Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), La Crosse Encephalitis, and Saint Louis Encephalitis (SLE).
The information collected from tracking and testing is used to guide the City’s adulticiding efforts.
During times of the year when adult mosquitos are active, the Mosquito Control nighttime crews perform adulticiding which involves applying pesticides from machines mounted on pick-up trucks in areas of the city where there are large populations of adult mosquitos.
Adulticiding is probably the most well-known activity that Mosquito Control performs, however, it is a late-stage effort to control adult mosquitoes that managed to escape prior larviciding (destruction of immature mosquitoes found in standing water) efforts.
Mosquito Control crews treat about 500,000 – 700,000 acres by this method every summer.
From November through April, Mosquito Control crews perform ditch maintenance services to reduce the amount of standing water that mosquitoes use to lays eggs and mature in.
No chemicals are involved in this process and ditch maintenance is considered one of the more permanent forms of mosquito control.
From May through October, Mosquito Control daytime crews perform larviciding, which involves going to known breeding sites throughout the city to treat standing water with chemicals that kill immature mosquito populations before they get the chance to mature, fly, and begin biting.
Mosquito Control crews treat about 1,000 acres of standing water with this method each season.