Re: Damned Mosquito's !!!
Bob,
Thru your experiment and research, how effective is stuff like eucalyptus and citrus on warding off the skeeters?
Good question, citrus, forget it, mosquito's tend to like sweet smelling things, the reason being that's what they live off {nectar}. The only reason they need blood is for the female to sustain the eggs before she lays them.
As for eucalyptus, yer on the right track, I can't say too much as the stuff that I formulated XL5 is in the process of being Patented, but...
It's called XL
5 for a specific reason, the 5 refers to the 5 continents where we have tested the product, there's a different "blend" for each continent, the reason being the mosquito's in each place tend to be a different species, each one developing over the last few hundred million years {they were around when the Dinosaurs roamed the planet}, so.
Like us {ex pat} Brits who are "meat & potato" men, the French being "cheese & onion" men, the Chinese being "rice and chicken" and so on they {the mosquito's} have developed likes and dislikes.
Let me put it this way, why would a Canadian mosquito not like eucalyptus ?
when she's never ever come across it ? means nothing to it at all, not one way or the other, but...
A mosquito {species} born and bred in Australia does have a genetic aversion to eucalyptus, I don't know why that's just how it is. We all have likes and dislikes, so do they...
As it turns out, no matter where a mosquito lives there will be some plants that they don't like, and some they simply can't stand the smell of, the secret is finding out what they don't like, and that aint easy, have you any idea what it's like trying to do a mind meld with a mosquito
But, some of the work/knowledge has already been done, trouble is we have almost lost that barefoot/generational wisdom, but here's typically how these thing came to light...
There were just as many mosquito's hanging about in the Middle East 3-5,000
years ago, and they were as much a nuisance to folks then as now, but...
Legend has it that, when men were looking after their flocks of sheep or goats they noticed that when they sat under the shade of a particular tree the mosquito's didn't bother them {as much}, so that's where they sat.
The problem was when they went home they would get bitten all night long, not the type of bit that you might enjoy when you're in bed either.
So, like the Native Indians who noticed sap coming out of maple trees, the guys figured it would be easier to carry the sap home rather than the tree.
The tree in this case wasn't the eucalyptus tree, it was the Boswellia tree, the sap is/was olibanum, known to us as Frankincense {starting to fall into place now} ?
I guess we have all heard of Frankincense, but few if any of us have any idea why it was thought so highly of, or what uses it was put to. We are now rediscovering what it was used for, one of the uses was to keep mosquito's at bay.
Wasn't quite as simple as that though, the sap did work when you took it home, but obviously it wasn't as pungent as sitting under a grove of Boswellia trees. so...
Some smart lad discovered {probably by serendipity} that if you burn the sap it really does stink, the smell was bad enough {to the mosquito's} that they wouldn't fly into the houses where folks lived, remember they didn't have glass windows, or mosquito screens, or even doors that closed all that well, but a smoldering nugget of Frankincense did the trick.
So if you live or work, or visit the Middle East you need to have XL5 v3, the one with Frankincense in it, that will do the best job for you.
Mind you, you don't need to be wandering around waving a a stick of burning incense around, so what I do is dissolve the Frankincense into a carrier oil {in my case soybean oil}, then when you "wear" it {XLT comes as a roll on} when it's on your skin the heat from your body is sufficient to drive off the smell of the Frankinsense, so the hotter it is, the more rotten you smell, to a mosquito, in the Middle East that is
I have a different formulation {5 of them} for each specific region of the world, each one of them has been tested against DEET @ 30% and shown from these scientifically controlled tests that XL5 is "equal to, of not better than DEET @ 30%".
Bare in mind though that NOTHING will dissuade every mosquito, not even 100% DEET {if you are brave enough to wear it}.
DEET @ 30% has proven to deter 95% of mosquito's for around 3 hours.
Other than XL5 nothing has yet been formulated to come even close to that, most things {like Skin so Soft et-al} have a deterrence rating {rated by the FDA} of around 15-20% and that's measured in minutes, not in hours, so essentially nothing comes close to the effectiveness of DEET, until the new kid came on the block
In a nut shell that's the bones of it, much as I can say without giving too much away
I've just got back from the UPS depot, so, Dianne in Manitoba, Art in PA, Rod in WI and Matt in FL, "your stuff is on it's way"...
