How to protect yourself from mosquitoes in the forest without special equipment
Mosquitoes, midges, horseflies, ticks, and other blood-sucking brethren can greatly spoil the impressions of outdoor recreation, fishing, mushroom picking, or just a walk in the forest. It’s good if you have a can of Deta or other repellent in your pocket. But not every repellent can provide protection against all types of bloodsuckers at once. In addition, the can does not last forever; it can end at the most inopportune moment, it can get lost, it can be forgotten at home, in the end! But there are several ways to protect yourself and your loved ones from bites and itching even in the most remote taiga, without having special equipment from a store or pharmacy. I will give examples of several of them. The methods described below provide more or less reliable protection against all types of blood-sucking insects.
Method one
Ants will help us with this method.
You will need a handkerchief or any other fabric item.
Everything is extremely simple: we place the handkerchief, unfolded, directly on the anthill.
Leave for 15-20 minutes until the ants saturate the fabric with their acid.After the specified time has passed, we remove the handkerchief, already wet from the acid, from the anthill, carefully shake off the ants from it, and wipe open areas of the body with it - the face, hands.
It is also necessary to wipe the sleeve cuffs, collar, and socks on the ankles so that creeping bloodsuckers, such as ticks, do not crawl under clothes. The smell, of course, is still the same (everyone knows what formic acid smells like!), but as soon as I lifted the scarf from the anthill, all the mosquitoes and midges were blown away by the wind! All insects instinctively try to stay away from both anthills and the ants themselves. The method is very good, with a very long lasting effect. One procedure is enough until a person washes his face with water. But there is also a drawback of such protection - individual intolerance. Therefore, you should first make sure whether you are allergic to formic acid. To do this, anoint a small area of skin near the wrist. If redness and itching appear, then it is better to abandon this method.
Method two
This method has two options, very similar to each other. They can probably be called “stationary”! If in the first method you can go wherever you want after treatment, then these two methods are tied to a specific place and protect against insects only within the parking lot. They are good, for example, for fishing, or just for a rest stop during a hike. So, option one: this is a tinder fungus.
Such mushrooms usually grow on old or dried out trees.
You will need to tear off the dry old mushroom from the trunk.
You will also need any thin branch on which you can plant this mushroom.
Now we set fire to the edge of the mushroom and stick the branch into the ground, about five meters from the parking lot.
You can make several of these smokers and place them on the leeward side.Just before sticking a branch with a smoldering mushroom into the ground, clear the ground of dry pine needles, leaves and moss to prevent a fire. The second option is almost no different from the first. Only here we will use dry cattail. Many people mistakenly call it reed.
So, you need to pick a few heads of last year’s cattail from the nearest swamp. Preferably on a small stem.
This material is perfect for protecting against small midges - for some reason, it is the smoke of smoldering cattails that it fears more than others. We repeat the above procedures, as with a mushroom: we set the head on fire and stick the stem into a place in the ground cleared of debris. The cattail smolders more intensely than the mushroom, and therefore it can be placed a little further away.
The well-known chaga can be used in the same way. It smokes no worse than tinder fungus or cattail. By the way, chaga can also be used in the countryside, during, say, digging a vegetable garden and planting potatoes. Personally, I stocked up thoroughly on this wonderful mushroom. In addition to the fact that it is a wonderful and healthy alternative to tea, it also perfectly protects against midges and mosquitoes in the garden.
Inhaling the smoke of a smoldering mushroom, of course, will not improve your health, but I believe that it is still better than breathing chemical smoke from a smoldering mosquito coil, or the same fumigator. You can also use birch tar. Getting tar from birch bark in the forest is not a difficult task. The only thing is that this is a more labor-intensive process compared to the methods described above. I have already described how to remove tar from birch bark in one of the articles.
