Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Summer has arrived
It's official. Summer has arrived. The guage for that around here is the arrival of the chiggers. How could I have forgotten about those nasty little bugs this year!? I ended up with several bites in unmentionable places this weekend and here I've been thinking . . . how could I have gotten so many tick bites in these places? I never found any ticks! Or maybe it was mosquitoes . . . but they just can't get to those places in the first place. Then, after two days, it finally dawned on me . . . CHIGGERS! Ahhhhh! Time to break out the powdered sulphur! I tell you, I think I must have about 100 bites or more . . . and I'm NOT exaggerating! (I'm itching as I type. Then again, with this many bites, I've about been itching all day long!) So, where to go from here . . . from now on, for the rest of the summer (until the first frost) I'll dust powdered sulphur over my ankles and legs. And if I'm going out to work for a while in the yard or garden, I'll even dust my waist area and my wrists/arms. It's the best deterant for chiggers that I know of and it really works, too . . . when you actually use it! I really need to formulate a natural itch-be-gone cream or balm to help with these itches, too!
About the sulphur - I got a bag of 'flowers of sulphur' about 6 years ago at our local feed store. It's a yellow powder and I keep a little tea strainer in it which I use to 'powder' up. It lasts forever - I've still barely made a dent in it. It does smell faintly of sulpher, but not bad at all - definately when you consider the alternative!
About chiggers - they are little, tiny bugs in the mite family - so small you can't even see them. When they bite, they secrete a substance into your skin which actually dissolves your cells. This 'mush' is what the chigger then slurps up. When I was a kid, people used to say that chiggers burrowed down into the skin and lived there until they died - and it would happen a lot quicker if you put nail polish on the bites. Well, that's just not true - but for some reason, the nail polish does seem to stop the itch . . . I wonder . . . a mental thing, maybe?
Any which way you look at it, I'd still rather have tick or mosquitos bites.
First, ticks. You can usually feel them crawling on you and get them before they actually bite. Durring tick season (spring till frost) if you're aware of little tickles that you'd normally 'automatically' itch, instead of itching there, just check it out. I seem to catch most of them that way before they ever get a chance to 'latch on' and bite. If you miss them that way, and they do 'latch on', it should start to itch very soon. They come off quite easily . . . if you do it right! Just pinch/grab it (lightly but securely) as close as possible to where it 'latched on'. Then give a sharp tug in the direction of it's body and it'll come out all in one piece. The trick is to do the whole thing quickly . . . they tend to come off easiest when you haven't messed with them. Maybe when you start messing with them they kind of 'hang on' more fiercely or something! It's also best to do it quickly so you don't have much time to think about what you're really doing! When we first moved here to the Ozarks, I was very paranoid about ticks . . . and was very squeamish about removing them, even from my boys. I remember our oldest was about 3 and had one latched on to the top of his head. Well, we heard that you shouldn't pull them off, so we tried several things we'd heard of to make it let go itself: vaseline, essential oils, a -very- hot nail head . . . nothing worked. Later we found out that these methods are really not good to try . . . the tick will end up dieing and then when you pull it off, the mouth-parts tend to get left behind in the skin. When that happens, then you have an extra-bad bite to deal with! (Trust me, I know!) So, with all this fuss, why would I rather have a chigger bite than a tick bite? Plain and simple - tick bites are smaller and don't itch for nearly as long, and you get fewer of them! You may wonder about Lyme disease and such . . . well, the good thing about Lyme disease (if there is a good thing) is that a tick has to be 'latched on' and feeding for 36 hours before it can start to transmit the disease. So . . . considering most tick bites start to itch immediately to just a couple hours after it attaches, it's easy to get them off before the danger period. Also a good reason to have nightly 'tick checks' with each other!
Second, mosquitoes. I must admit, mosquito bites come in a close second to chigger bites for me. The bites don't seem to bother my hubby nearly as much, but on me they swell up quite large and itch like crazy. When we were first married, my hubby told me that the bites would go away much quicker if I just didn't itch at all. So I tried that. I would put anti-itch stuff on the bites when they would begin to itch . . . and this went on for days! Finally I could stand it no longer and I itched them like mad . . . made them bleed . . . boy, did that feel good! Then they stopped itching. So I did an experiment after that . . . and found (with me, anyway) that my mosquito bites will continue to itch until I break the skin on the bite. So the sooner I do that, the sooner the itch will go away. I know that we have to deal with the West Nile virus now, and I have learned that the virus cannot be transmitted on the mosquito's first 'meal' - only on subsequent 'meals'. (And yes, only the females bite.) Once you get to know me, you'll find that I like to use natural things . . . so I use essential oils as insect repellants which work quite well with mosquitoes (and little to not at all with chiggers and ticks). They'll still buzz around you quite close, but they won't land and bite.
Chigger bites aren't like mosquito bites . . . breaking the skin on the bite doesn't help in the least . . . the bites will just seep a clear liquid, dry over, then itch again. It takes about a whole week for my chigger bites to stop itching. On top of that, they even leave little discolored areas on my skin where the bites were, which sometimes take months to disappear.
Well, enough about my disdain for chiggers. (I must admit, I cannot see why Yahweh created these three critters.)
