Sometimes, you have to fight fire with fire. At least, that’s the mindset Bee Safe Mosquito Control is taking in their approach of releasing 600,000 mosquitoes across DC this summer. The male mosquitoes are infected with Wolbachia bacteria, which works to sterilize female mosquitoes.
The good news for DC residents is that the male mosquitoes do not bite humans, and once they mate with females, the bacteria they carry prevents future eggs from hatching. The Silver Spring company, the only one in the country that offers this kind of pest control service in residential areas, aims to reduce the harmful effects of insecticide spraying by using a method that affects only mosquitoes.
Owner Todd Montgomery, who started the company in 2023, says they are serving 25 residential customers in DC and Maryland by releasing 1,500 mosquitoes a week in each of their backyards throughout the summer.
“We basically are trying to control mosquitoes without impacting anything else to the greatest extent possible,” Montgomery says. “We want to be as eco-friendly as we possibly can be.”
The company sources its mosquitoes from MosquitoMate, a company in Kentucky that uses technology developed by the University of Kentucky to infect mosquitoes with the naturally-occurring Wolbachia bacteria that causes sterility in females.
This particular method is a new offering for the company this season. They also offer mosquito baiting stations, which attract mosquitoes and infect them with fatal chemicals, and a service where they apply mosquito-killing bacteria to bodies of water.
The newer method has seen success in other areas, with the government of Singapore releasing millions of bacteria-infected mosquitoes, aiming to cover 50 percent of households by the end of 2026, and seeing an up to 90 percent reduction in mosquito populations in the treated areas. Google’s parent company Alphabet is also seeking federal approval to use this method and release 32 million mosquitoes in California and Florida.
Montgomery says there are currently logistical issues—including local production of mosquitoes, cost, and legal hurdles—that prevent this method from being used at the government level in the US, so his company is seeking to fill that gap with private services.
“That’s essentially the long-term vision: let’s get the scale, let’s get the local production, let’s get the costs down, and we’ll really be able to scale it up,” Montgomery says.
