MOSQUITO PEST

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 20, 24 January 1924, Page 9

MOSQUITO PEST

These are the halcyon days of the mosquitoes, the days when health officers are busy telling one what to do and what not to do with the little pest if one wants to sleep peacefully at night and wake up with the feeling that-sim-ply impels one to sing while one is under the shower. But there is said to be a use for everthing, although it is difficult to understand why these little gnats came into the world with a proboscis invented for the one and only purpose of piercing the skin and annoying people. It looks, however, as though the city shops have entered into a pact with the mosquitoes, in or-der-that they might live happily on and multiply, for there is an extraordinary demand just now for mosquito nets. All day people, with faces blotched like "hundreds and thousands" in a Christmas cake, are entering the shops and asking despairingly for "skeeter netting." Mosquitoes, as a matter of fact, have never been so numerous as they are this summer, despite all the campaigns. They are even getting savage. A resident of Wahroonga, one of the aristocratic northern snburbs, has had a number of his chickens attacked in the eyes by mosquitoes, and almost blinded It looks now as though one will have to get blinkers for the fowls and the chickens, as well as imprisoning oneself behind netting at night,,-or burning manure in the house, and screening all receptacles and getting rid of ornamental fountains, and so on. At the moment

Sydney is engaged in a desperate war with the blood-suckers. The mosquitoes ar. winning so far. To swat a few thousand of them is nothing, for out of the stagnant waters, out of the tanks and the sagging gutters and old tins lying about, they come in their serried ranks.