Mosquito help please!

[Doubleraspberry]

Our house is near a stream so we often get mosquitos in the summer. My husband is a keen killer of them but other than that nothing we’ve tried has ever been truly successful. Which is plug in, scent and sticky, Skin So Soft, curtains closed. I can’t bear the smell of the heavy duty repellents and I am wary of them around the kids.

But over the past week something has clearly changed outside - maybe the stream has dried up over a dry spell - and we are totally under siege. We’re all covered in bites and DH killed 25 in our bedroom last night alone.

Any ideas at all or are we doomed?

Bump. Or might be a bite.

When are you being bit, is it mostly at night ? If so I would be tempted to get a mozzie net

Entirely at night. How easy is a net to put up over a normal double bed, do you know? We don’t have any helpful ceiling features.

They are more attracted to anyone with O blood type. So you may be screwed anyway.

Stop eating bananas, for some reason they make you more attractive to mosquitoes.

Skin so soft doesn’t work at all. That’s a myth!

I know this professionally.

Likewise those snap bands marketed to kids... they are not tested to work and are 2019 version of snake oil. IMO given the lack of regulation on them, the claims made by manufacturers are total lies and if someone were to travel to a place where mosquitoes transmitted diseases, kids would be completely unprotected- this for me is outrageous

Mozzie nets will help you, there are some on the market that are coated to repel and to kill mosquitoes and they are safe with kids. You can get frames and/or pin them to the ceiling

There are repellents that are safe to use for kids and can be applied safely - look at application doses and repeat use - regulations are changing so you can see how often you can reapply

They aren’t pleasant but the spirals that burn can help keep them away if you’re outside

Moving air - fans move the air about, mosquitoes don’t appear to like to fly in breezy conditions

Garlic works for me and my mother. They don’t bite us. My grandmother didn’t get bitten either.

They were/are Malaysian and biting insects avoid us.

However my children are not so fortunate and they get bitten. They don’t eat as much garlic, if any at all, though.

My husband gets bitten but not so much if he’s had a lot of garlic to eat!

Definitely a mosquito net. You get the fixtures that go in the ceiling with it when you buy it and it's quite straight forward to install. Also perhaps screens on your windows which I understand are pricey and require some drilling but are a very good investment (unless you have cats to scratch them

I would put a screw in ring into the ceiling...not hard to do

Another thing, I take extra Vitam B as do my mother and my grandmother did too.

I use a combination of wipes which you can get from home bargains as I find you can cover all your skin, as with a spray you can miss bits. I also use Turkish lemon cologne in a small spray bottle. For after bites I bought some ammonia gel in Spain which is fantastic, although not sure you can get it over here.

Thanks, all. We rent, so I will have to check nets with the landlord. And we have very high ceilings so will do some research on net lengths! The kids would enjoy them.

I’ll also look again at repellents. The one I’ve tried for adults before have made me feel nauseous from the smell, so it was a choice between that or being bitten.

Smidge! Works a treat we use it every year in Scotland. Used to use skin so soft, which was fab until they changed to formula.