Household Pests and Their Treatment. 69 



Disappointment in the use of this powder is sometimes the re- 

 sult of buying powder that has lost its *' strength" from not 

 having been kept in tightly closed receptacles. 



MOSQUITOES. 



Mosquitoes are to be considered very dangerous household 

 pests, tho they commonly breed out of doors. Some species, 

 such as the yellow fever mosquito, may be said to live, when 

 adult, in dwellings, far they seem never, at this latitude, to be 

 found in the woods and fields. Others, like the malaria mos- 

 quito, breed in streams and ponds and enter houses less fre- 

 quently when adult. 



The yellow fever mosquito is constantly present in Ken- 

 tucky, becoming most common in late summer, when, at times, 

 it is so numerous as to occasion much suffering, tho not 

 ordinarily conveying yellow fever, because the disease is not 

 present in the State except when brought here by people com- 

 ing from infected regions farther south. The mosquito is 

 by far the worst house-infesting species, and is quite capable of 

 giving rise to an epidemic of the fever here, as it did in 1878, 

 at Hickman. when 749 cases and 149 deaths occurred, if the 

 conditions are ever allowed to become favorable. A single yel- 

 low fever refugee, not quarantined, is calculated to supply the 

 conditions. 



The yellow fever mosquito (Aedes calopus) breeds almost 

 or quite exclusively in barrels and buckets about dwellings. In 

 Kentucky it is not found elsewhere, and people who suffer from 

 the pest often furnish the breeding places. A single bucket 

 partly filled with water and left standing near the kitchen door 

 will provide enough of the insects to render miserable the lives 

 of everybody in the immediate neighborhood. 



The adult mosquito can be recognized by its sharply black- 

 and-white banded legs and the silvery dots and lines on its 

 body. It is active during cloudy days, coming out from behind 

 desks and other hiding places and alighting quietly on the 

 wrists and ankles of people who are closely occupied at a desk 

 or in reading, and darting away again and hiding whenever any 



