Why must I empty the water from the vase? Why mummy? It’s still clean.
Because mosquitoes will lay their eggs in the water. You must also wash the vase carefully, or some mosquito eggs will remain and hatch when you refill the vase with water.
Why must we cover the water barrel, mummy?
Mosquitoes like still, stagnant water to lay their eggs. If you do not cover the water barrel, there will soon be hundreds of mosquito eggs in the barrel. A female mosquito can lay more than 400 eggs at a time. In one day, these eggs will hatch and wriggle around like little worms in the barrel. In a little more than a week, the little worms, or larvae, grow wings and will fly. Just imagine all those mosquitoes coming back to lay eggs in our water barrel.
All of them, mummy?
Well, not all of them. Just the female mosquitoes. Mosquitoes can feed on nectar from flowers, but when it is time to lay eggs, the female mosquitoes must have blood from an animal. Remember, that means humans as well. The female mosquito has a long, sharp sucking tube. She jabs this tube into the skin and sucks up the blood. Later, she will be able to lay eggs, and you know more eggs mean more mosquitoes.
Well, a little bite does not hurt much, mummy.
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It is much worse than losing a little blood. Mosquitoes spread diseases. Malaria and yellow fever are spread by mosquitoes, so is dengue fever, chikengunya or Chik V and zika. If a mosquito bites a neighbour, who has dengue fever, and then comes by our house and bites you, you can get dengue fever. Of course, the mosquito will not just stop here, and many more people will get dengue fever.
Now, will you empty that vase?
Some easy questions to answer:
Where do mosquitoes lay eggs?
How many eggs does one female mosquito lay?
What does a female mosquito need before she can lay eggs?
Name two diseases spread by mosquitoes.
How can you help to stop mosquitoes from breeding?
How do mosquitoes spread diseases?
Other things to do:
Make sentences with these words: clean, stagnant, spread, worse.
Make posters to help people understand how dangerous mosquitoes are.
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