Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, the mosquitoes that carry dengue, are not like the ones that come off a marsh at dusk. They breed in very small amounts of clean, still water, they rarely travel more than a couple of hundred metres in their lives, and they bite during the day. Taken together this means something useful: the mosquitoes biting you are almost certainly breeding on your property or within a few doors of it.
That is why fogging alone disappoints. It kills the adults in the air at that moment. It does nothing to the larvae in the plant saucer, which become adults the following week. Source reduction is unglamorous and it is what actually works.
Take twenty minutes and walk your property with a bucket. Empty and scrub, do not just tip — Aedes eggs stick to container walls above the waterline and survive drying for months, hatching when the container refills. Tipping the water out and leaving the eggs is why the same containers keep producing mosquitoes.
The places worth checking, in rough order of how often they turn out to be the source: plant pot saucers and the trays under potted plants; roof gutters holding water where they sag or block; the drip tray under an air conditioner; water tanks and storage barrels without a proper lid; discarded tyres; buckets, watering cans and toys left outside; blocked drains and gully traps; the folds of an unused tarpaulin; ornamental water features without fish or movement; and the bases of hollow fence posts and bamboo.
Construction sites and unoccupied neighbouring properties deserve particular attention, because nobody is walking those with a bucket. If the problem is next door rather than at home, that is worth raising with the owner or, where it persists, with the local public health inspector.
A few changes make the effect last. Store buckets and watering cans upside down. Fit tank lids properly rather than resting them on top. Clear gutters before the monsoon rather than during it. Put sand in plant saucers so water is held but larvae cannot develop. Keep ornamental ponds stocked with fish, which eat larvae.
Where water genuinely cannot be removed — a tank in use, a permanent drain, a water feature — larviciding treats the water rather than the air, and lasts far longer than a fog. That is worth a professional visit, and it is worth asking any contractor whether their proposal includes source reduction and larviciding or is only fogging.
Personal protection still matters while you do all this: repellent during daylight hours, screens on windows, and long sleeves at dawn and dusk. But the twenty-minute walk with a bucket, repeated weekly through the wet season, will do more for your household than anything you spray.