What is your best friend against mosquitoes?

The mosquitoes have been out for almost a month and now the black flies have just arrived for the rest of June. Soon the heavy hitters will come, the deer and horse flies. It’s a natural progression that gets worse and worse. But today swooping out of the sky like saviors there were three dragon flies, the first of the season.

Mosquitoes you can almost deal with, big slow and clumsy. After a few bites, you develop an immunity. The black flies are tiny and come in clouds of bad medicine. They are not neat and tidy like the mosquitoes, instead they chew up your skin until it bleeds, and then feast on the open wound. The worst part is you don’t feel it happening until it’s too late. The good thing is, they only last one month.

The heavy hitters are impossible, their bite is the worst and they are big, fast and persistent. However, they seem to have a seeker head that is easily fooled. It seems they home in on brown colored fur. The counter measures are decoys (patch of brown sticky fur on a hat) and camouflage (hat).

Sometimes when I’m outside there will be six or seven dragon flies hovering about following me everywhere. Occasionally they’ll come swooping in and just as fast retreat. I can’t figure out if they are keying on me or the other bugs that are also following me about.

I need to figure out how to encourage the production of dragon flies.

Attack Helicopter

Or just another pretty bug