The impact of permethrin-impregnated bed nets on malaria vectors was studied in 6 pairs of villages during the rainy season in 1989. In each pair, the residents of one village had their nets treated whilst those of the other remained untreated. Routine collections of mosquitoes were made outdoors in the early evening using human-biting collections, and indoors with insecticide sprays, light traps and by searches under bed nets. Mosquitoes of the Anopheles gambiae complex, An. gambiae sensu stricto, An. arabiensis and An. melas, were present in large numbers for 5 months of the study period. These mosquitoes were susceptible to permethrin as judged by bioassay results. Outdoor human-biting rates in the early evening in communities with treated bed nets were similar to those in communities with untreated nets. In villages with treated bed nets most biting occurred outdoors in the early evening with little taking place under impregnated nets. The insecticidal activity of permethrin-impregnated bed nets, dipped by the local population, provided good individual protection against mosquitoes throughout the rainy season and bed nets remained effective even when washed up to 3 times. There was little to suggest that the use of insecticide-treated nets reduced the survival of mosquito populations in villages with impregnated nets. The absence of the expected village-wide effects of net impregnation may have resulted from the circulation of mosquitoes between villages with treated and untreated nets. The proportion of mosquitoes which fed on humans did not differ significantly between villages with treated and untreated nets.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)