While
Midland
County
crews are completing treatment to as many A. vexans sites as they
can get to (
Midland
County
received over four inches of rain in the first part of June), I sit here
reflecting about what pearls of wisdom I could offer to the MMCA
membership. Other than, thank
God I don’t live in Ludington with all their recent rain; I will pass on
what we tell our crews to keep them inspired as they trudge through the
breeding sites. Larviciding is
the invisible part of mosquito control but the most important part. When
you stop and figure the number of mosquitoes that can be produced
by an acre of breeding site it brings the importance home.
At the risk of being a participant in Dr.Wilmot’s “Liars Figure
and Figures Lie” club, I offer these figures up to you for your
consideration. At 2
mosquitoes/dip and 5 dips/square foot there would be 10 mosquitoes for
each square foot of habitat. When
you multiply that by the 43,560 square feet in an acre it would produce
approximately ˝ million mosquitoes. In
my opinion this figure is a very conservative estimate, and the
general public is unaware of how much control is being done because they
often do not see the treatment occurring or the mosquitoes in the water.
Providing the public with this figure helps them understand how
much we are accomplishing. I
know that I am preaching to the choir but I hope that the choir will sing
the praises of integrated mosquito control and continue to educate the
public to the fact that our industry is much more than a ULV truck going
down the road.
Work continues on developing the 2009 conference in
Ann
Arbor
. Please contact
Joyce
McLaughlin at (989) 687-5044 if you have a presentation that would be of
interest to the membership. A
site visit was made to Amway Grand Plaza Hotel to select meeting rooms for
the 25th annual conference set for
February 2-3, 2011
. The hotel will be placing
MMCA in two very nice meeting rooms and the rest of the hotel certainly
lives up to its name. Negotiations
continue with several items still needing to be worked out but the room
rate that they are offering conference attendees is extremely reasonable.
It should be an exciting time as MMCA celebrates its 25th
meeting,
mark
your calendar now for both meetings.
MMCA
has been accepted as a partner with AMCA into the EPA’s Pesticide
Environmental Stewardship Program (PESP).
The Board has directed the Scientific Committee to work on the
project and develop a form to gather information that will be needed from
MMCA members for the report.
