Biting midges or cedar gnats or no-see-ums
Biting midges, cedar gnats, no-see-ums, basty nasterds etc... By any name they are the scourge of the southwest and it seems, the world over. I can only talk about the southwest since it's the only...
Forum Discussion
When we started to travel overseas to countries where malaria was prevalent I did a lot of research that has served us equally well in the USA.
Treat your clothing, including socks, with permethrin. If you buy it in 1 Qt concentrated solution and dilute with water and use a $5 garden sprayer you can treat each garment for a nickel and it lasts for 50 washings. It is the same treatment done by every service member in Iraq and Afghanistan and Kuwait, etc. where there are many disease carrying insects, not unlike the entire USA (lyme disease first showed up in Connecticut).
Second line of defense for exposed skin is a mixture of 20% picardin bug repellant and Skin So Soft, the Avon product. Johnson & Johnson actually make a bug repellent now that has these two ingredients. The Skin So Soft is worthless against mosquitoes but extremely effective against chiggers while the picardin is affective against the mosquitoes but not the chiggers. A mix of the two in a spray bottle works perfectly. I learned the hard way in Fiji that just spraying repellent onto my skin was not enough but that I needed to rub the solution to be sure that I had 100% coverage of my skin.
The bites from bugs are annoying but it is the diseases they carry that I worry about. Ticks carry 22 different forms of bacteria including Lyme disease and the sand flies in the Middle East and North Africa carry a disease that can attack the eyes leading to loss of vision. And then we have always had Rocky Mountain spotted fever (also carried by ticks) in the western mountains, and add in malaria which with warmer weather is now making its way into the northern USA, and bubonic plague from fleas, and with an increasingly large and healthy rodent population thanks to exterminating the wolves and foxes across the country, and we have a perfect storm.
The southwest is where one should go to get away from bugs. Never had a mosquito bite in all my nights sleeping out under the stars in the desert areas of AZ, NM, or CA.
Treat your clothing, including socks, with permethrin. If you buy it in 1 Qt concentrated solution and dilute with water and use a $5 garden sprayer you can treat each garment for a nickel and it lasts for 50 washings. It is the same treatment done by every service member in Iraq and Afghanistan and Kuwait, etc. where there are many disease carrying insects, not unlike the entire USA (lyme disease first showed up in Connecticut).
Second line of defense for exposed skin is a mixture of 20% picardin bug repellant and Skin So Soft, the Avon product. Johnson & Johnson actually make a bug repellent now that has these two ingredients. The Skin So Soft is worthless against mosquitoes but extremely effective against chiggers while the picardin is affective against the mosquitoes but not the chiggers. A mix of the two in a spray bottle works perfectly. I learned the hard way in Fiji that just spraying repellent onto my skin was not enough but that I needed to rub the solution to be sure that I had 100% coverage of my skin.
The bites from bugs are annoying but it is the diseases they carry that I worry about. Ticks carry 22 different forms of bacteria including Lyme disease and the sand flies in the Middle East and North Africa carry a disease that can attack the eyes leading to loss of vision. And then we have always had Rocky Mountain spotted fever (also carried by ticks) in the western mountains, and add in malaria which with warmer weather is now making its way into the northern USA, and bubonic plague from fleas, and with an increasingly large and healthy rodent population thanks to exterminating the wolves and foxes across the country, and we have a perfect storm.
The southwest is where one should go to get away from bugs. Never had a mosquito bite in all my nights sleeping out under the stars in the desert areas of AZ, NM, or CA.
