How to Deal with Mosquitoes

I still don’t understand the evolutionary point of mozzies. Unless they were the Earth Goddess’s way of keeping human populations in check (thru malaria and the like), it just doesn’t make sense what purpose they serve. Worms aerate the ground, spiders catch little insects, and dragonflies are among the larger insects that feast on mosquitoes, so I can appreciate all of those critters. Even cockroaches serve some purpose, tho I can’t recall what it is other than to freak people out in TV shows and movies. But mozzies are pointless. I know that Buddhists don’t believe in taking the life of any animal, but I’d bet that some of them draw the line at those little blood-sucking enemies of mankind.

Now it happens that I’m one of those people virtually unaffected by mosquitoes. To the mosquito palette, I’m lima beans and Brussels sprouts. Happily, the same is true of Emmett. He and I can walk thru the woods on a muggy night and come back almost unscathed. In fact, when a mosquito alights on my arm, my first reaction isn’t to shoo it away but to stare in amazement while pondering if mosquitoes can have stuffy noses. And if I do fail to react in time, the result is uniformly boring: a tiny red dot, barely raised, that produces only a little bit of itching.

But not the girls! Fiona came back from camp one summer with over 200 bug bites. Shirra is equally attractive to mosquitoes. When Maeve was born, we discovered that deliciousness of blood is carried on the X chromosome in our family: she’s a mozzie-magnet, too.

So what to do? It turns out that bats are just as fond of mosquitoes as I’m not. One small brown bat can eat a hundred of them in ten minutes, or so I’m told. As soon as we heard that, we bought a bat house. We have yet to install it; that’s on the agenda for tomorrow.