Short Answer: Bucks and Montgomery Counties sit squarely in the Lyme disease belt. Effective family-safe mosquito and tick control combines targeted perimeter applications (synthetic pyrethroid sprays applied to harborage areas, not blanket-sprayed across the yard), botanical alternatives where the lawn borders pets or play areas, In2Care mosquito stations that target breeding sites, and tick-specific tube applications that treat the white-footed mice that carry the disease. Programs run roughly $50 to $90 per visit for a typical half-acre yard, with treatments every three weeks during peak season. Honest tradeoff: stronger products work longer but require careful timing around pets and kids. Botanical products are easier to schedule around family life but need more frequent reapplication.
If you live in Doylestown, Newtown, Solebury, Buckingham, or any of the wooded edges of Lower Bucks and Upper Montgomery County, you already know what a single deer tick on a kid means. A flashlight check, a phone call to the pediatrician, a two-week wait to see if the rash shows up. For families in our region, tick control is not a luxury. It is a piece of the same routine as sunscreen and bike helmets.
Pennsylvania has the highest reported Lyme disease case count of any state in the country most years, and Bucks and Montgomery Counties contribute heavily to that number. So the question we get most often from parents and pet owners is not whether to do mosquito and tick control. It is how to do it in a way that actually works without putting the wrong things on the lawn around kids and dogs.
Here is the honest answer we give, with what each program type does, what it does not, and how to think about the tradeoffs.
Where Mosquitoes and Ticks Actually Live in Your Yard
The first piece of effective control is knowing where to apply it. A blanket spray of the whole lawn wastes product and exposes more of your yard to insecticide than necessary. Targeted application starts with knowing the targets.
Mosquitoes rest during the day in shaded, humid, low-airflow spots. The undersides of leaves. Dense shrubs, ivy, and pachysandra. Behind sheds. Under porch decks. Around compost piles. Inside hollow ornamental grasses. They breed in standing water of nearly any size, including bottle caps, kid toys, clogged gutters, saucer trays under planters, and bird baths.
Ticks are different. Ticks do not fly or jump. They climb a few inches up a blade of grass or a low branch and wait for something warm to brush past. They live where their hosts live: at the edges of lawns where the grass meets woods, on stone walls (a classic Bucks County feature), in leaf litter, in tall grass borders, and in any zone where deer or mice travel. They almost never live in the middle of a regularly mowed lawn.
This is why effective tick treatment focuses on the perimeter of the yard, the edges of woods, stone wall lines, and the borders of any wild or unmowed area. Treating the open lawn does very little for ticks. Treating the edges does a lot.
What a Pyrethroid Perimeter Treatment Actually Does
The most common professional mosquito and tick treatment uses a synthetic pyrethroid (typically bifenthrin, lambda-cyhalothrin, or permethrin) applied with a backpack mister to the underside of leaves, the edges of beds, the bases of shrubs, fence lines, stone walls, and lawn borders.
These products work by contact. A mosquito or tick that lands on a treated surface picks up the active ingredient and dies within hours. The residue lasts about three weeks under typical conditions, though heavy rain can shorten the window. After application, the products bind to leaf surfaces and are not systemic in the plant.
Reentry timing: most pyrethroid labels allow people and pets back on treated surfaces once the application has dried, typically 30 to 60 minutes after the technician leaves. The active ingredient is tightly bound to surfaces and is not picked up significantly by skin or fur contact once dry. That said, we recommend keeping kids and dogs off treated foliage for the rest of the application day to be conservative.
What pyrethroid treatments do well: knock down adult mosquitoes that land on treated surfaces, reduce tick populations in perimeter zones, and provide consistent three-week control. What they do less well: kill mosquito larvae in standing water (that needs a different treatment) and reach ticks that ride into the yard daily on deer or mice (that needs a tick tube program).
Botanical Programs: When They Make Sense
Botanical mosquito and tick programs use plant-derived active ingredients (cedar oil, rosemary oil, geraniol, lemongrass oil) instead of synthetic pyrethroids. They are not pesticide-free, but they are EPA-exempt under the 25(b) rule, meaning they are considered low risk to pets and people.
The honest tradeoff: botanical treatments break down faster. Where a pyrethroid treatment gives you three weeks of control, a botanical treatment typically gives you 10 to 14 days. So the application schedule is more frequent, and the per-season cost works out similar or slightly higher.
Botanicals are the right choice when the lawn has heavy play traffic from very young kids, when you have small dogs or cats that lick everything, or when you simply prefer plant-derived products on principle. They work, just on a shorter cycle.
What we do not recommend: relying on DIY essential oil sprays from the garden center as a Lyme-belt prevention strategy. They smell nice and they do something for a few hours. They are not a substitute for a structured program when the disease pressure is what it is in our area.
In2Care Mosquito Stations: A Different Approach
In2Care stations are sealed buckets containing a small amount of water and a treated cloth. Female mosquitoes are attracted in, pick up a larvicide and a fungal pathogen on contact, and either die before laying eggs or carry the larvicide to other breeding sites in the area on their bodies.
The clever part: a single station can effectively treat dozens of breeding sites the homeowner does not even know about, because the mosquitoes spread the larvicide for you. Two to three stations placed strategically around a half-acre yard can substantially reduce the local mosquito population over a season.
In2Care works best paired with perimeter sprays, not in place of them. The station targets the breeding cycle. The spray targets the adult mosquitoes already in your yard. Together they cover both ends of the lifecycle.
Stations are also a strong choice for properties that want minimal direct insecticide application but still need real control. Yards near community pools, beekeepers, butterfly gardens, or organic vegetable beds often appreciate the targeted nature of station-based control.
Tick Tubes: The Tool Most Homeowners Have Never Heard Of
Tick tubes target the wildlife reservoir of Lyme disease rather than the ticks directly. The white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) is the primary reservoir host for Borrelia burgdorferi (the Lyme bacterium) in our region. Larval and nymphal ticks feed on these mice and pick up the bacteria, then carry it to humans and pets later.
A tick tube is a cardboard tube filled with cotton treated with permethrin. Mice find the cotton, take it back to their nests, and the permethrin kills any ticks that try to feed on the mice or their nestlings. It does not harm the mice. It interrupts the disease cycle at the wildlife level.
Tick tubes are placed in mouse-friendly habitat: along stone walls, brush piles, woodpiles, the edges of woods, and similar harborage areas. A typical Bucks County yard uses 20 to 30 tubes deployed in spring and again in late summer. Properly used, tick tubes have been shown in independent studies to reduce nymphal tick populations on the property by more than half within a couple of years.
This is a slow-burn solution. You will not see results in the first month. By the second season, the local tick population in your perimeter zones drops noticeably. We include tick tubes as part of our family-safe program for properties bordering woods or fields.
What to Expect from a Season
An honest description of a well-run program looks like this. Mosquito complaints drop sharply within the first two weeks. The yard is usable for evening cookouts and kid play within the first week of a treatment cycle. Some mosquito activity returns toward the end of each three-week cycle, which is the cue to schedule the next visit.
Tick encounters drop steadily through the season, especially when perimeter treatment is paired with tick tubes. Year-one numbers might be cut in half. Year two and beyond often see a much larger drop as the local mouse-tick cycle gets disrupted.
No legitimate program promises zero mosquitoes or zero ticks. Anyone making that promise is not being honest about what these tools do. The real goal is reducing the yard’s pest load to the point where families can actually enjoy the outdoor space without constant bites, with a fraction of the tick risk they would face on an untreated property.
What to Do Next
If you would rather have a local team design and run a program tuned to your specific property (woods edge, kid traffic, pet considerations, neighborhood drainage patterns), we are here for that conversation.
Lawn Squad of Bucks and Montgomery Counties serves Abington, Ambler, Ardmore, Audubon, Berwyn, Blue Bell, Bridgeport, Bryn Mawr, Buckingham, Chalfont, Colmar, Conshohocken, Devon, Doylestown, Dresher, Eagleville, Flourtown, Fort Washington, Furlong, Gladwyne, Glenside, Gwynedd, Hatboro, Hatfield, Haverford, Horsham, Jamison, King of Prussia, Lafayette Hill, Lansdale, Merion Station, Montgomeryville, Narberth, New Hope, Newtown, Norristown, North Wales, Oreland, Philadelphia, Plymouth Meeting, Solebury, Spring House, Valley Forge, Villanova, Warminster, Warrington, Washington Crossing, Wayne, West Point, Willow Grove, Worcester, and Wynnewood.
Call us at 610-750-9768 or request a free quote at lawnsquad.com. Our mosquito and tick programs are designed for southeastern Pennsylvania families who want their yard back without compromising on safety around kids, pets, or the bees in the garden.
