mosquitos

recently i have been contending with a multitude of mosquitos in the garden, and their numbers seem to be rising as the season progresses...i had thought this was because the foliage in the garden, particularly the jerusalem artichokes, provided a damp and cool refuge from the current august heat...my stubborn insistence on extending my ban on chemical inputs in the garden to include insect repellent ( it smells godawful and i don't care what the msds says about health factors, it cannot be good for you...might as well douse youorself in ddt) has left me swatting and convulsing as i work, doubtlessly attracting unwarranted attention to the weirdo that mutters to himself continually while weeding...but that's leading us away from the salient point here...after i got home this morning i sat down at the computer and as i idly scratched i googled mosquitos to read up on the little critters and i discovered something i had never known and which clears alot of things up...i knew that it was female mosquitos that did the biting as part of the reproductive cycle...i figured that they drew their subsistence through that mechanism as well...since male mosquitos didn't bite i was never too concerned about how they survived..just figured they had a short lifecycle and eating wasn't a high priority...this is not the case...both male and female mosquitos are nectar feeders...that explains their concnetration in the jerusalem artichokes..nectaries attract more than beneficial or neutral insects...those pesky little things are living off our flowers...you can never know all the results of your actions and there are unintended consquences all over my life ( let me take this opportunity to apologize to all of you i have unwittingly offended or otherwise harmed...it may indeed have been my fault but it wasn't intentional and intentions do count ) chalk this up as another one.