Seeing as how I hate mosquitoes, I don’t understand having a holiday or national day for them.  Does anyone like them?  Maybe frogs or other animals that eat them, but I don’t think there is one human being out there who has any kind of attatchment to them.  My distaste for these flying, biting insects was not always so.  Of course I never liked them because they bit and their bites itch.  But it wasn’t until 2 years ago when my family took a trip to the Wisconsin Dells that my hatred began.  We love to camp and so decided to rough it at a local camp site for the week we would be there and then spend our days in the Dells having fun.  The problem was that it was in the heat of the summer and our camping lot was right near a small pond with slow flowing streams.  Neadless to say, we had standing water (which mosquito’s flock to) and it made our trip miserable.  Well at least mine.  I know I’ve been bit by mosquito’s before and never had a reaction.  But on this trip, they bit and I swelled up.  I was bit on my forearm, shin and forehead among others, but those three places decided to grow to enormous sizes and became rather embarassing.  Plus, they itched like crazy!  Then a few weeks ago I was in Colorado and it happened to be mosquito season.  I was bit again and the bites became swollen.  I now hate mosquitoes.

So, I guess today can be better labeled Mosquito Awareness Day.  Let’s learn a little more about these blood suckers, shall we?

The preferential victim’s sweat simply smells better than others because of the proportions of the carbon dioxide, octenol and other compounds that make up body odor. The powerful semiochemical that triggers the mosquito’s keen sense of smell is Nonanal. A large part of the mosquito’s sense of smell is devoted to sniffing out human targets.