Pesticide resistance is an issue that affects every pest management professional no matter the geography, the pest or the weather.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), mosquito resistance is a problem that professionals need to be aware of. The CDC describes resistance as “an overall reduction in the ability of an insecticide to kill mosquitoes.” So, when resistance occurs, control success is lowered significantly, raising the prospects for costly callbacks.
Pesticide resistance is certainly a concern for PMPs who offer mosquito control services. PCOs successful at mosquito control have put a proactive plan in place.
John Reid, vice president and co-owner of Virginia Beach-based Accel Pest & Termite Control, said his company has a 30-day system internally to prevent mosquito resistance. “We already do a month on, month off program for resistance. We treat on a monthly basis every 30 days; we will change products every month and we also use an insect growth regulator every other month. Instead of switching quarterly we switch monthly and have a pretty good result with that. Along with that, we tested the results, and we feel we’re giving our customers a better value at the end of the day, and we’ve had good success with that rotation.”
Mark Johnston, sales manager for ABC Home & Commercial Services, Austin, Texas, said resistance hasn’t been a problem at his company and “as long as we continue to see a drop in the population, we can tell it’s continuing to work. We haven’t had any resistance with the product we’ve using the knock them down.”
Staying on top of industry trends, learning about and using the latest products and technology and being aware of environmental changes all help combat resistance.
“Things change, the environment changes, the mosquitoes themselves change. There’s things you have to do to change — you can’t use the same stuff over and over and over,” says Court Parker, CEO of Bug Busters. “We track callbacks to determine if a change is the territory or the product or the technician — we’re always looking at what our measurables are.”
Del Lawson, vice president of Houston-based Modern Pest Control, says his products are the cornerstone of his mosquito program’s success. “So, we’re trained in the pest control industry to rotate products and that’s kind of the second thing we learn — the first being safety,” he said
Lawson also said his company has found success using MGK’s OneGuard. “With [OneGuard] a mosquito can land on a leaf and pick up some on its legs and land somewhere else and allow it to transfer it. A large oak leaf full of water and mosquitoes filling eggs with it, one infected with OneGuard and then lands on the water it affects the 1,000 eggs in that leaf and that’s really the best part of that.”