And have them think I’m looney? No way, man.
I can handle it. I think. I need me some Skin-so-Soft Avon body lotion or so I’ve been told. I’m not the only one who spotted the aforementioned mosquitoes in my friend’s house, btw. We all saw them. My fearless SO, my brave fella, MFF; he done smashed one into tha’ there wall and saved me from doom. I loves him, I do.
*…and they cheered him onward, calling out, “Mosquito-smasher!” in tones of reverent awe… *
It’s late and I should be abed. sigh
The worst ones are the ones that have to hide in every available crevice on your body. You’ll be sitting under the shade in 90 degree heat, playing poker with some buddies or weaving a lanyard into a keychain, when weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee and there’s one crawling right into your Gawddamned ear and you flail at the side of your head like a madman and you can’t get it and it’s wiggling around and finally you jam your pinky in as far as it will go and bring it back to find half a smashed mosquito on your fingertip. Repeat every twenty seconds, because now there’s exposed blood in there like a shining beacon to every filthy pestilence-ridden bug in the great outdoors that your auditory canal is the insect equivalent of the Sunday brunch buffet at Ceasar’s Palace. Grrrraaaaahhhhhh!
Sorry, Lost Valley Scout summer camp flashback. ::shudder::
Has anyone tried the eating a lot of garlic as a method of repelling mosquitos? I eat a lot of garlic, but it usually gets cooked. I’ve heard that if you eat LOTS of RAW garlic, they leave you alone. But then your fearless SO might leave you alone a little more often, and we wouldn’t want that.
Homer: Come on, Flanders, there’s gotta be something you hate. What about mosquito bites?
Ned: Mmm mmm! Sure are fun to scratch! Mmm! Satisfying!
I’m given to understand that the reason mosquito bites itch is an allergic reaction to their saliva. I’m also given to understand that some people are NOT allergic, and mosquito bites cause them no discomfort whatsoever.
Anyone like this, or know anyone? Declare yourself I say, and prepare for the inevitable pile-on!
My earlier post was a joke, and not even my own. It’s true that only females bite, and it’s true that males have special noisemakers on them, but as suggested, they tend to be clustered together and females make SOME noise (the one that keeps you up from another room is probably male though).
Anyway, Spidey: garlic pills are a good natural insect repellent. Mosquitos are picky about whose blood they suck, and I have learned that garlic pills will keep them from biting you (though perhaps not from pestering you) by changing the smell of your blood enough to make them find you distasteful. It works on black flies too, I never would have survived the Maine springs without them.
Last night the mosquito spray trucks came by. I never though I’d be happy to see trucks spraying chemicals at my home, but I get huge welts from mosquito bites and if you notice my location, we have a hell of a lot of the bastards. So what happens after they spray?
I wake up with two of them. One on my right heel (?) and a bigger one on my left ankle. I itch.
Fucking little bastards. Oh, they’ll get blood out of me. I don’t feel bites, and I’m one of those people who smells really good to them. I must start bathing in repellent or something.
I hear the females can smell people with a high fat content and bite them. WHich maybe why I never had a huge problem Otherwise, keep your house shut tight.
I don’t eat foods that are high in fat though. I’ve been eating more veggies and less carbs, too, this past year. There are times I don’t get bit but I haven’t noticed a pattern. I need that Avon, Skin-so-Soft, lotion. Everyone who has used it tells me it’s a wonderful mosquito repellent. Without becoming an Avon lady myself and knowing none in my neighborhood, can anyone tell me if it’s sold in stores? Thanks in advance.
Meh, the greenheads I’ve seen have been slow and stupid. They tend to sit there for a few seconds pondering before biting, so it’s easy to get medieval on their thorax. Granted, it hurts when they do bite, but as long as you stay out of the marsh areas for a couple of weeks in July, you’re all right. Mosquitos, on the other hand, are legion – they breed in the local tidal marshes and then party on down to my place. I hate those bastards with the fire of ten thousand electric bug zappers.
Mosquitos are nothing compared to Black Flies during Black Fly season in northern Ontario - which, fortunately, is short.
When the Black Flies swarm, it becomes almost physically impossible to go outside without being eaten alive.
And unlike mosquitos, Black Flies actually chew a hole through your skin, resulting in bloody rashes and infections. Yuck.
The only good thing about them is that, for some reason, they don’t bother you indoors.
Ah yes, black fly season in Northern Minnesota. The happy days of my youth, canoing through the Boundary Waters, flies chewing through your jeans, with no free hands to swat the buggers 'cause you’ve gotta make it to the next campsite…no wonder I moved down south. And the skeeters are nothing down here compared to up north, lemmetellya.
With respect to the OPer, I’ve never found Skin-So-Soft to do a bit of good, and neither have any of the other outdoorsy folk I know. Get yourself something with deet in it. If it’s really bad, get the 100% deet stuff. Just don’t overdo it. And it’s very, very true that if you leave the bite alone, it stops itching within about an hour. Trust me.
I agree with that 100% - DEET is the only stuff that actually works, the rest are urban legends. Too bad that stuff is so potent it dissolves plastic on contact. 
Northern Ontario and Quebec must be the world capital of biting insects. Consider:
-Black Flies in numberless swarms;
-Skeeters in numberless swarms (true story: in a particularly bad year, I went up to the cottage with my SO. Around about nightfall - the “hour of the bug” - I thought I heard a motorboat pulling up to the campsite. I was wrong - it was the sound of literally billions of Skeeters buzzing around the screen porch. We peed in a bucket that night, rather than go out to the outhouse!);
Horseflies in open areas - big bastards with a megaton bite;
Deerflies in open areas, which specialize in dive-bombing your head and are immune to repellant (neat gadget: put double-sided sticky tape on the back of your hat, the deerflies stick to it and can be killed easily!)
Stable-flies, which specialize in biting your ankles when canoeing and are near impossible to kill;
Punkies or no-see-'ems, tiny little flies that can get through skeeter netting (also known as sandflies).
It is enough to drive you frigging insane! That is why I prefer camping near the end of August or beginning of September - may be a bit cold, but less buggy!
Living in the hot, humid South and with a yard chock full of dense vegetation, an automatic sprinkler and a couple of bird baths, we had a real problem. Skeets were starting to chase us out of our yard and it wasn’t even Spring yet.
I found two things that appear to have darn near eliminated our problem.
Mosquito-B-Gone - It comes in a green plastic bottle and you just hook it up to your garden hose and spray your yard once a month or so.
Mosquito Dunks - Drop a cake or a portion thereof in standing water like a birdbath. It won’t harm birds and such but does kill the mosquito larvae.
I feel your pain, Sanguine. Not quite literally - yet - because it’s not spring yet up here (boo!). But I get the itchy bastards too, and I also get people telling me ‘Just ignore them and they won’t itch so much!’
Bullshit !
As Dante suggests, I believe some people are more allergic than others.
I’m hugely allergic. Mozzies bring me untold discomfort. The day after I arrived in Brazil I had sixty-one big, inflamed, itchy spots on my left lower leg alone.
If you are like me, Avon SSS will not work. Grinning and bearing it will not work. Peppermint essential oil will not work. Toothpaste/vinegar/other home remidies will not work.
OFF kind of works, but I don’t like being covered in poison all the time, especially in bed.
Nothing works like a mosquito net !
And mosquito bites are the only one of my allergies that will cause me to re-think my anti-anti-histimaine stance. Take some allergy pills, they may help.
Same here re: spring. You know winter’s been too long when you envy someone being bitten by mosquitoes.
I have the perfect mosquito defense. My girlfriend!
Hehe. It seems like all the mosquitos only bite her, and not me. Or maybe I just don’t react to the bites. I used to think there were no mosquitos around here, until I met her.
Heh I better close this thread soon, she’ll be home any minute.
/ducks.
I just want to address the raw garlic thing: it doesn’t work. I am very big on garlic, and I am a mosquito buffet. My friends put me out as bait in the summer. I will stand there swearing and slapping and saying “damned mosquitos!” and everyone else says, “Gosh, I haven’t gotten one bite all night!” and then I say “FINE! I’m going in the house” and about five minutes later they all come trooping in saying, “Man, you went in at the right time! Just after you left, the mosquitos descended!”
Someone told me vitamin B works, but I can’t remember which number vitamin B, and I won’t take them because they make me burp icky.
Skin-So-Soft doesn’t work on me either. OFF! does, but there’s that “going to bed covered in poison” problem. Cutter, the stuff that allegedly makes you invisible to bugs? It does - they apparently can’t see me at all, so they’re forever flying into my face if I wear Cutter. So that’s no help. I have a bat house in my yard, and I encourage froggies to live in the creek that runs behind my house (and it does run, it’s not standing water). Both bats and froggies are said to eat million sof mosquitos in a single evening, so I apparently have BILLIONS because they can’t keep up at all.
All you get from me, it seems, is sympathy.
::raises hand::
It’s more or less true. I work in the Mosquito Research and Control Unit here at Rutgers, and being exposed to them over time does lessen the reaction. Some of the guys that have been here for a long time hardly react at all. The drawback is that you have to be bit a lot. And there are still some species that make me itch like maniac - it sucks BIG TIME when you have to go catch mosquitoes and you can’t wear repellents.
The problem with SkinSoSoft is that while it may be effective for some people, it’s effectiveness is for such a short period of time that it looses value as a repellent. DEET (25 to 30%) is the most effective for the longest period of time.
Sanguine, do you have an unfinished basement? Some mosquito species overwinter as adult females in places like basements (and caves and the such). And you may want to check your rain gutters to make sure they’re not clogged and retaining water. Also, those dishes that hold flower pots can hold enough water to have larvae in them. Birdbaths, treeholes, anything that can hold water (pool cover) can breed them.
And hope you have the type of mosquito shown in the second link in my sig. She’s big, she’s bad (she is a brick…house) - a predatory mosquito that eats other mosquitoes and doesn’t drink blood. Go Tox!
How true … and I was thrilled to get a whiff of a skunk last week, too.
And here I thought tulips were signs of spring.