Learn Bushcraft skills by videos
watch the best bushcrafters explain techniques and skills

Lyme Disease, Tick, Mosquito and Fly Defence, Permethrin Clothing Treatment

Description

#bugs #selfreliance #diy

Avoiding lyme disease, this is my regime for repelling tick, mosquito and fly species in the wilderness at the log cabin.

For more information, read the blog post on my website here.

https://myselfreliance.com/home-applying-permethrin-effective-tick-control-lyme-disease-prevention/

Please subscribe:

https://bit.ly/2G7ncW9

Playlist Links

Building the Forest Kitchen: https://bit.ly/2GSjkJa

Log Cabin Build Step by Step Playlist: https://bit.ly/2LttALh

Building the Forest Kitchen: https://bit.ly/2GSjkJa

Food, Wild Edibles, Recipes: https://bit.ly/2sc1riW

Bushcraft: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-UbUksm4nPk2dpiJb-wfPrpJkodkS7g7

Outdoor Gear: https://bit.ly/2KSSbYI

Log Cabins: https://bit.ly/2sdl0HF

Links to gear used at the cabin:

Fjallraven Vidda Pro Pants - https://amzn.to/2rhEiMn

Tilley Endurables Airflo Hat - https://amzn.to/2Ia4xy1

Apeman Trail Camera - https://amzn.to/2HRZSNT

Cabelas Trail Camera - https://www.cabelas.ca/product/86944/cabelas-outfitter-14mp-ir-hd-trail-camera

Mora Knife - http://amzn.to/2BOiv35

Agawa Canyon Boreal 21 Saw - http://amzn.to/2BPV6OF

Axe - http://www.torontoblacksmith.com/

Eagle Claw® Multi-Purpose Jet Sled - https://www.cabelas.ca/product/34435

Moka Pot - http://amzn.to/2DEomvO Canada http://amzn.to/2ndmtw6 USA

Virtus Knife- http://www.virtusknives.com/

Canon 6D - http://amzn.to/2EdaZjs

DJI Mavic Pro - http://amzn.to/2DHuJib

Solar LED light bulb 15W - http://amzn.to/2BQvSQ2

Copper Fairy lights - http://amzn.to/2BCmF0X

Solar String Lights - http://amzn.to/2DvgU2n

Lodge Dutch Oven - http://amzn.to/2kHuxDQ

Bragg’s Sprinkle - http://amzn.to/2EdouzK

To see what I’m up to during the rest of the week, please follow me on my other online channels;

Website: http://myselfreliance.com/

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/MySelfReliance/

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/myselfreliance/

My Mailing Address:

P.O. Box 20042

Barrie, Ontario

L4M 6E9

Canada

Tags: Self Reliance,log cabin,homestead,diy,alone,wilderness,bushcraft,forest,cabin,woods,My Self Reliance,Shawn James wilderness living,lyme,lyme disease,tick,mosquito,fly,tick control,disease,permethrin,permethrin clothing treatment,clothing treated with insect repellent,clothing hacks,bug spray,insect repellant

Video Transcription

as you might be able to see there's a lot of mosquitoes buzzing around my head [Music]

we have these cool conditions right now I've had a couple of days of cool weather combined with rain and therefore the mosquitoes are able to stay active all day long so it's not so bad here I thought it would be worse here at the Calvinists remember this is the first bug season that I've had this cabin standing this location so I was curious to see how it was going to be rest of the forest and down by the road where I parked the vehicles a little bit swamp here and the mosquitoes seem to be bad down there all the time at this time of year like all day long I mean here at the cabin not so bad but of course periodically and a morning and and at dawn of dust they do get quite bad so so when you spend as much time outdoors as I do and you're basically living with the bugs and you have to have ways to combat them or they just drive you crazy I just would not be able to do what I'm doing especially at this time of year in the spring and early summer with they would having an effective bug control regimen so I'm wearing this cheap bug jacket it's a tight weave mesh basically it holds a little bit of heat in because it is fairly tight mesh so it's not the most comfortable when it gets really hot that's what I don't like about wearing bug jackets but it is highly effective and it has a hood if I pull it over choke myself

pull it over especially if I do leave a hat on a peaked ball cap is better but keeps the mesh off your face so the bugs can't bite through but this zips right up and when that's closed its 100% effective for bug control but like I said it's just too hot for me I find so I need something more effective plus the other issue of course almost everywhere now in the US and Canada is ticks black legged ticks which carry Lyme disease a bacteria that causes Lyme disease and it's not here yet the block legged tick does not live in this area yet but there is a fairly high deer population here considering it's as far north as I am here

but what's happening of course is that the tics are moving north as the climate continues to warm so we have just south of here we've got some cases of Lyme disease in the last year or two so expected eventually they'll end up here so I am a little bit concerned about Kali and I'm concerned about myself and my family especially my girls who when they go camping or hiking it's usually more to the south where there is more ticks so a few years ago when I started becoming more concerned about Lyme disease as researching methods to protect myself and protect my family and seems that permethrin so clothing seems to be the most effective and the reason for that is because permian actually kills bugs on contact so if they land on your clothing it'll actually kill them it doesn't just deter them so if a tick is crawling on your pants or crawls on your your boot or shoe and up your sock and it gets on your skin and latches on within 24 hours it starts transmitting fluids back into your body and that's where they where they become an issue where they can cause infection no no it's just what a lot of disease but other diseases as well so that same tick though is climbing up permethrin soak sock or pant leg or something or even a shoe then the tick will actually die I found out that it's actually effective for mosquitoes and black flies as well so I start applying this stuff to my clothing three years ago problem is in Ontario Canada I think all of Canada you're not allowed to buy permethrin for personal use or buy clothing that soaked information for personal use so that's unfortunate in the u.s. there's a number of manufacturers who do that they'll pre-soak the clothing and permethrin because they're able to set it at high temperature it lasts a lot longer than applying it the way I apply it so I've had to order livestock grade permethrin which is at 10% at dilution at 10% solution and you need it to be down to about 5% solution to be effective so that means I need a 19 to one ratio so 19 parts water to one part per meter and this is concentrated from a three so I'm going to go ahead and mix that up right now

and soak my clothing in it and I just need to hang it to dry be aware that this stuff is highly toxic in concentrated form so you don't want to get it on your skin too much and you want to be careful about where you dispose of it and even where your clothing is dripping as its drying so I'm going to be aware of that as I do it now at the leftover stuff a couple of things you can do is you can let it evaporate so leave the pail open let it evaporate to the air let all the water escape and take the solids and dispose of the matter hazardous waste disposal area or what I prefer to do is just dilute it or put a lid on it and it's actually going to be good still the following year that's what I typically do once I make up a batch it's good for a while the other option is to put it into spray bottles of some other smaller container where you can disperse that in areas that you want to kill bug so for me around the base of the cabin inside on the where the wall joins the floor I'll put some around there just to deter the ants that seem to be getting in right now black ants so if you want a little bit more information or you want to see the actual ratios depending on what the quantity that you're looking for how to mix that then go to the link here takes you to the article and the website that I wrote two or three years ago and that'll help you make mix up your own batch so I ordered mine from ebay because it's not available in Canada and it wasn't available on Amazon even if you want to click on the link in the website you'll find find a link to where I got this so that's what it is like I said it's 10% it's actually made for livestock so I need to dilute this to 5% to be safe for humans but once it's diluted applied to clothing and dries on there it does not continue to leech into your skin in fact your clothing will be good for up to 6 washings or 6 weeks after you treat it it'll continue to be effective on your clothing now the real benefit to that is the alternative is that you're applying bug repellent and bug repellent they're most effective one is DEET directly to your skin which of course you do absorb into your skin so this on your clothing is much safer and putting insect repellant directly on your skin so that's why I used otherwise I would never have chemicals in my regimen or in my cabin especially but to me dealing with bugs effectively is not just for comforts for safety as well for help till first I have to go down to the water oh I need to do a video still on how I deal with my water here I do have a hand pump down at the road where I parked the truck but I haven't hooked it back up for the spring because in the winter it freezes so need to hook that up and show it to but in the meantime I usually just go to water from either the puddles that accumulate here in the tree wells or down the stream here so let's go grab some water right now and then get this thing mixed up okay so I brought five gallons of water up from the stream this is a five gallon pail which is 20 liters I want to reduce that to what am I putting I'm gonna do pants socks hat shirt maybe two shirts so I want I could probably get away with just 5 liters if you have latex gloves then put those on I don't have any here I have these neoprene or latex impregnated cloth gloves I'll just have to be careful not to get it in its concert concentrated form on the back of my hands here so I'm just going to go ahead and pour the whole thing in there so I actually should be wearing glasses - all right just gonna pour this in gonna make sure she doesn't go anywhere near this other pail so I'll put a lid on this as soon as I get the clothing soaked in it so you notice the water here it's got a lot of tannin and a twitch of course any stream or lake that has leaves falling in it branches and stuff like that it's gonna have a lot of tan and so that's a brown color that tea stain want to be careful if you were doing white clothing up here not to stain your clothing but it's that tannin that's used for tanning hides so I make so when I tan a moose I'd heard bear hider deer hide or a small game hide I'll actually use tannin water sometimes just really concentrated and I found the most effective way to do that was with oak bark so so take a big plastic garbage can fill that with water and fill it with as many kind of oak bark pieces as possible let that sit can't remember what in last time I did it how long I let it sit but you'll notice that the water gets really really dark and you can take a hide that's been scraped down properly and soak it in that so I'm not sure how good it is for you but I run this water through the berkey water filter inside for drinking and everything else I just boil it to wash dishes and do stuff like that but I'm not gonna Justin it's not necessary I drink water straight from the lake or filtered or boiled from the lake all the time on my outdoor trips [Applause]

you know good timing books are really bad right now range is stopping it's starting to warm up a little bit so they're gonna get bad for a while and they'll disappear once the heat of the day starts and let this soak for up to two hours so at least an hour we'll get a clothes line going here and then I'll pull it out and let it drip dry so stick at new home so that Callie can't get at it nope tell you so another thing about bugs is that they are attracted to dark colors so you'll know what I said I usually wear this type of thing during bug season this is just a regular branded you know outdoor brand fishing shirt basically so we know with all the venting in the back and color that flips up which I keep up a lot of the times on the back of my neck long sleeves that can be rolled up and tucked in to make it a short sleeve shirt problem with that is when you're out on the water you get burned on your your forearms and your hands so it's helpful to have a long shirt covering your full body but that's so light and material weight as well as color that it doesn't overheat but really good test is to stand beside somebody you wear this and somebody else wears a dark look especially black or dark blue garment and you'll see all the bugs accumulating on them and and avoiding you it'll go straight to that black first so hats included so I always wear my lightest hat during bug season this is my oldest Tilley probably and my lightest colored one and not only is it light in color what's a lightweight breathable fabric with lots of venting so I don't overheat on the water and when I do get overheated I just scoop it in the water and put it on my head this I also soaked in permethrin so what'll happen if the bugs land on that don't either die or they'll quickly take off because they don't like the smell or the taste of it so very effective now sometimes I'll also put a sort of a two sided sticky tape on the back of his hat deer flies and horse flies tend to circle and then they land on the back of your head because they know where your predator eyes are and when they do that and they land on that sticky tape then they get stuck to it you can remove them later instead of having them continue to search until they find some vulnerable skin somewhere so light clothing is absolutely essential to avoid bugs or to lessen the impact of biting insects in the spring so all these layers and I was soaked with permethrin so I've got my shirt my hat pants and socks so anything that lands on me will there be repelled or died it doesn't act like a repellent in that it smells and that it turns them off and they don't land on you but when they do land on you they immediately I don't know what happens exactly but they don't bite through because they are impacted by the Permian before they get a chance to bite through my clothing so I'm finding that they're effective with those stable flies or whatever they are that we seem to have around here now we didn't have years ago so it looks like a housefly but it bites just like a deer fly we have deer flies horse flies mosquitoes no cmsr I think somewhat similar to I guess a mage from the UK and did I say mosquitoes and black flies so predominantly the things I'm most concerned about are mosquitoes and black flies so I find this quite ineffective repellent or deterrent from to those bugs so so so far this spring it hasn't been all that bad that last video there was a couple of scenes that Kelly was covered in mosquitoes and I had a bunch of mosquitoes buzzing around me had to smudge fire is going but overall especially during the day they haven't been that bad but over the last few days we had that rain that you saw and now some warm sunny days so the bugs are breeding like crazy in the road even in the middle of the day right now so a little bit uncomfortable but things like this permethrin so clothing the bug jacket the smoky fire and deet-based deep door citronella based bug repellents on my skin but I guess I've built up a tolerance spending so much time outside so they don't affect me as much I don't really swell up or react to the bug bites you know the odd one I might but typically I don't I'm so therefore it not as panicked about them and the panic is what raises your your perspiration and then your carbon dioxide emission which is what the bugs are attracted to so it pays to stay calm but I mean that's just the reality of the life in that in the woods and I'd rather like I said in other videos deal with bugs because the environment is pristine clean enough for the bugs to survive and rather than the city or suburban environments

where the water is polluted and there's not enough forest cover so therefore the bugs can't survive so that's the trade-off so if you want more information on per meter and how to dilute it to the proper concentration and where to get it then refer back to the website to provide the link up here and also in the description below it'll take you to the website the article I wrote two or three years ago that explains all of that for you so as the summer progresses and the temperatures get warmer and the boy starts drawing out and the little streams and everything start drying out the insects stop breeding so bugs get better and better as the season goes on so really it's a month or two of dealing with this and then we're back to a nice conditions so anyway I better get back to work here appreciate you following along don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and make sure you check in every Friday to watch me doing stuff here at the cabin so have a great way take care I'll see up at the cabin next time [Applause]

About the Author

My Self Reliance

My Self Reliance

Shawn James Canadian outdoorsman, photographer, guide and self-reliance educator. Writer for Ontario Tourism. myselfreliance.com Outdoor adventures, including survival, bushcraft, canoeing, kayaking, hiking, snowshoeing, fishing and camping.

More articles from this author