Someone in Mott picked up the wrong can.

They sprayed a thick sheen of On all over everything.

Mott's the spot for mosquitoes in North Dakota, based on trap counts released Friday by the state health department. The trap in the Hettinger County seat captured more than 12,000 mosquitoes between June 18-25, far and away the most at any one location.

The only safe place in Mott right now might be underwater.

"It's not so bad if you're in the water, with just your head sticking out," Jesse Jacobson, a lifeguard at the Mott pool, said. "But when you're up in the chair watching the kids, it's pretty nasty. People at the pool are slapping their arms a lot. You can't really sit out on your porch after 8 at night, because the mosquitoes are just swarming around. It's bad all over."

The 12,192 mosquitoes trapped in Mott last week were about the same as the number trapped at the 13 locations in Region VII, of which Bismarck and Mandan are a part.

Mike Trythall, a microbiologist who heads the state's mosquito-arbovirus program, said weather conditions and trap locations are what cause one part of the state to report dramatically more or less mosquitoes than another.

"It's all environmental,"he said. "Counts are site-dependent. How much moisture that site got, what the temperature was, plays a big role."

Mott has had 3.76 inches of rain in June, and highs last week averaged a warm 81 degrees. More to the point, probably, the overnight lows there were above 60 degrees for three nights in a row. Standing water and multiple nights above 60 creates a lot of buzz.

"It's just an ideal situation for lots of mosquitoes," Trythall said. "But given the kind of year we've had to this point, (the trap totals) aren't an awful lot of mosquitoes. We've had good moisture and have been getting some high temperatures."

The health department has 99 traps set up across the state, and tallies the figures weekly. Mott's numbers are much higher than the state average of 1,200 mosquitoes per trap.

In second place on the dubious list was Crosby, with 9,984 mosquitoes. Next were Fort Stevenson State Park (8,485), Bismarck (6,368) and the Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge near Pingree (6,345).

For the most part, mosquitoes are just a nuisance. But some, as you certainly must know by now, can carry disease. In North Dakota, the mosquito that most often transmits West Nile virus is the female Culex tarsalis.

Mott leads the way there, too, with 1,984 tarsalis mosquitoes counted last week. The total at that single trap was more than every other region in the state reported, and the regions are made up of seven to 13 trap sites each.

The percentage of Culex tarsalis mosquitoes in Mott was 16 percent. Crosby and Fort Stevenson reported no tarsalis mosquitoes, and just 2 percent of Bismarck's mosquitoes were tarsalis.

North Dakota has its first human West Nile virus case of the summer last week, in a Cass County woman. The woman was not identified. She was in the age group of 60 years or older, and was not hospitalized. West Nile can cause symptoms similar to the flu. Most infected people never get sick from the virus, but in rare cases it can lead to severe illness or death.

Ten people have died from West Nile virus in North Dakota since 2002, when it was first reported here.

(Reach reporter Tony Spilde at 250-8260 or tony.spilde@;bismarcktribune.com.)