/out/ - Outdoors

Bay leaves can be made in to a tincture that you can rub on the skin that repels bugs iirc

Always wondered this myself.

Something I've observed in my time /out/ is that I get bitten by mosquitos to a much greater extent than my swarthier, tanner, and older relatives. I theorize that there are individual differences which make one a smaller target for mosquitos which probably depend mostly on the weathering of your skin, but I've never seen any scientific studies on the matter.

All I know is that I've seen my cowboy uncle totally free of skeeters when I'm positively swarming with them, many times.

I've been leading canoe trips for the past 4 summers, and for the past 3, i've avoided using bugspray.

It's not too bad if you work during the hours of daylight, and get to bed before/in twilight, because that's when the bugs really come out, at least here in Canada.

Also, campfire smoke will keep them away. And you can avoid them by living in dryer areas, away from marshes, ect..

>>1138

is on to something i think, also I should mention a lack of hygiene seems to help keep them away.

In addition, the mosquitoes that annoy you a lot here, the ones with stripey abdomens are recent migrants from Asia, so the natives wouldn't have to deal with them.

Down in the south, the US military started doing these retarded ops (look of operation big buzz/big itch, there was a couple and I can't remember them all) where they would dump a metric fuckton of insects (like mosquitos, etc) for biowarfare tests or some shit. Long story short, they farmed up a shitton of insects and started dumping them everywhere. Thing is, they didn't die off or disappear, so some areas are still completely fucked because of it.

What I'm basically trying to say is that in some places, it's a lot worse now than it used to be.

Also, it's a lot warmer now than it used to be, so insects of more active. But fuck Canada and the arctic plains…….you fuckers have some seriously out of fucking control bugs flying around.

>>1156

>>1138

The idea about some people being less prone to bugs bothering them interests me. My father's side of my family seems to be impervious to it and so am I. My brother however seems to attract the fuckers. I'll be sitting pretty and fine watching him get eaten alive across the campfire. I was always told that it eating tons of garlic, which is something I do, makes your body odor repel bugs though, not necessarily genetics. Has anyone done any research on this? Anecdotally it seems to me like a common knowledge thing that some people just don't get bitten a lot and that makes it seem odd that I've never heard of a study about it.