Do citronella candles really work?

Apparently not the ones I bought. Maybe they have an expiration date...I did buy them over a year ago. Bought them to use on the balcony last summer, the balcony that I decked out with tons of flowers, the requisite plastic table & chairs, and lots of citronella candles. The balcony that I never sat on because I was never home last summer (that would also be why the aforementioned flowers all shriveled up and died by the end of July).

This summer I added a grill. But I still don't sit on the balcony. My street has been under construction for, well, a really long time. And since I am on the "first" floor*, my balcony has been covered with the normal road dust multiplied by a factor of 100. I did get motivated to clean it this week (there is an end in sight to the road construction; if I clean it this week, it won't be so hard to clean again when they're done, right?), but I'm still not sitting out there until the jackhammers go away.

Doesn't matter. The mosquitoes have all decided to join me inside, anyway. I'm sitting in my dark living room and apparently they are drawn to the light of my monitor. So I decided to get some use out of those citronella candles and lit one on the table right next to me. The mosquitoes are still doing fly-bys on my monitor. I guess that's better than their normal pastime of making my ankles and feet look like I have chicken pox! Ugh...did I waste more money on candles that won't keep the bugs away? I should have saved it and actually bought flowers for the balcony this year - now that I'm home to water them. Of course that would probably just attract more bugs. Oh well, I can't complain - it's summer!

*In Romania, the "first" floor means the first floor above the ground level; in my building, that actually means the third floor, since the ground level businesses all have an internal second story that you can only get to through their private entrances. I walk up two flights of stairs to get to my first floor apartment!

This is my apartment building. See the ambulance in the middle at the bottom of the picture? Look directly above it. The first balcony (the one without windows enclosing it) is mine.