Avoid mosquito bites with Indigenous knowledge & science!

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Welcome to my swamp. I'm here to get ate up by skeeters, and I'm going to tell you how you can avoid those painful, itchy bites based on science and indigenous history, as usual. Become immune to mosquito bites, or at least stop reacting to them. I get asked a lot how natives historically dealt with mosquitoes, and I'll get to that, but I'll start with saying I've noticed for years that whenever I travel somewhere far away from home, I suddenly get these itchy mosquito bites. Also, each spring in my home area, I react a little bit to mosquito bites at first, then it stops.

[00:00:32]Most of the time in my area, mosquito bites cause no reaction or itching at all. So, here's my hypothesis. Mosquito populations have unique compositions of the cocktails of chemicals in their saliva they inject into you, and each spring my immune system has to adjust to the newest batch of skeeter juice and learns to not fight it. But, distant areas have different mosquito populations, and my immune system isn't used to their saliva, so I react. And is there science behind this? Well, yes, but the pathophysiology of itch and mosquito bite reactions is surprisingly poorly understood. Mosquito bites don't cause itch or welts when scientists snip off the salivary ducts of mosquitoes, so it's clearly caused by saliva.

[00:01:12]The saliva is insanely chemically complicated, though. Its purpose is to prevent coagulation, dilate blood vessels, and a lot more. And some of these component chemicals likely activate histamine receptors on skin nerve endings, and others induce a inflammatory response. The immune system starts to recognize these and react less, but if a population has a different chemical makeup of its saliva, it has to relearn. So, mosquitoes are known to be attracted to CO2, dark colors, and body odor. They also like shady areas without much wind. Now, there are genetic differences in attractiveness to mosquitoes, and factors such as body fat and diet are also likely important. Now, I never use bug spray of any sort, cuz that stuff is toxic, man. I actually get super angry when I see people apply bug spray and jump into like some spring fed creek water. Like, what are you doing? That kills all the insects in there. It's a very important part of the ecology.

[00:02:07]Anyway, you actually already know one natural way to avoid blood suckers.

[00:02:12]>> That's it.

[00:02:14]>> Garlic. And yes, this is the origin of the vampire repellent myth. Eating raw garlic immediately saturates your blood with sulfur compounds that mosquitoes hate. There is some scientific evidence for this and it definitely works for me.

[00:02:26]Aromatic smoke and air currents are also highly effective. When I lived in the Peruvian Amazon to do insect biodiversity surveys, there's an insane amount of mosquitoes there, many different species. And here's how I dealt with them there. One was to continuously smoke a mapacho, a native tobacco cigarette. Now, I don't smoke, but the smoke from that, especially tobacco being an insecticide, was very effective at deterring mosquitoes. So, you just leave it burning. Another way was to avoid dark colors, uh to keep clean, and if you can avoid it, stay out of areas with still air. Now, to go into my hammock at night to camp, I would walk down the trail about 100 m and then run full speed to leave the cloud of mosquitoes behind and jump into my hammock, close the mosquito net, then swat all the mosquitoes that had chased me in there inevitably. So, it's definitely a nightmare in the Amazon.

[00:03:18]Luckily, we have it a little bit better in the temperate US, except maybe some places like Canada, it can get really bad. A scientific study showed that American beautyberry leaf extracts are shown to deter mosquitoes and ticks.

[00:03:29]Now, I just rub the fresh crushed leaves on my skin for this purpose. Nandina leaf and fruit extracts are also shown to be effective mosquito repellents, which is great. We finally have a use for this horribly invasive species.

[00:03:42]Okay, but what did indigenous peoples do historically?

[00:03:45]Well, to repel mosquitoes, the Karankawa used shark oil on their bodies. And the Haudenosaunee use oil from hickory nuts, especially shagbark hickory or Carya ovata or walnut, especially eastern black walnut Juglans So, that's one way, aromatic body oils.

[00:04:03]Another way is smoke or smudges. So, sagebrush was burned in Hidatsa houses to deter mosquitoes. And the Meskwaki name for white sagebrush translates to mosquito smoke, and they used it very similarly. The Lakota use slimflower scurf pea or Pediomelum tenuiflorum as a smudge to deter mosquitoes. The Akimel O'odham burned green creosote wood to repel mosquitoes with the smoke.

[00:04:29]The Diné finally chopped up the aboveground parts of a goosefoot species and spread out on their face and arms to deter fly and mosquito bites. The Quapaw living in the mosquito-rich lower Mississippi built platforms 15 to 20 ft high upon which they slept in order to avoid biting insects. So, a lot of different possibilities there, but an underrated tactic is to simply accept them and build up immunity to the itchy reaction. And it's a bit speculative, but based on my experience, I think it's possible that you really can become immune to mosquito bites or at least stop reacting to them.

[00:05:13]An underrated tactic is to simply accept them and build up immunity to the itchy reaction. It's a bit speculative, but based on my experience, I think it's possible that you can become immune to mosquito bites or at least stop reacting to them. I get asked a lot how natives historically dealt with mosquitoes, and I'll get to that, but I'll start with saying