No-See-Ums?
This problem has been troubling me since the weather got warmer. Whenever I’m in my house (Garden and Parlor floors with large yard) I feel like I’m getting bitten by something. It isn’t painful, just a little itch, but i never see anything on my skin or flying or jumping around. I have a dog,…
This problem has been troubling me since the weather got warmer. Whenever I’m in my house (Garden and Parlor floors with large yard) I feel like I’m getting bitten by something. It isn’t painful, just a little itch, but i never see anything on my skin or flying or jumping around. I have a dog, but it definitely isn’t fleas (I know what they look like). At first I thought I was imagining it, then I thought it was dry skin, but it only happens at home. I keep my house pretty clean and shower a lot, so I don’t think it is a cleanliness problem. I have experienced no-see-ums in the Caribbean and that is kind of what this reminds me of. Could it be bedbugs? I’ve heard they’ve made a resurgence in NY. Are they visible to the naked eye? Is there some other 100-yr-old house problem that I don’t know about? It is getting very annoying. Help!
I AM NOT CRAZY.I know WHEN I AM BEING BIT .I COULD’NT SEE ANEYTHING.BUT AFTER LIVEING A NIGHTMARE FOR A WEEK OR SO AND READING EVERYTHING@ANYTHING I COULD ON THE BITING MIDGE I STARTED TO UNDERSTAND MORE AND COULD SEE A CLOUD OF TEETH MOVEING ACROSS THE ROOM [I WAS THE TARGET.]MY HOME WAS GONE AND THERE WAS NOTHING I COULD DO!BUT GET OUT.SO MY HUSBEND AND I GOT A ROOM AT A HOTEL.BUT TO OUR SUPRISE THE TEETH WERE ALONGE FOR THE RIDE.WE DID NOT GET ANY SLEEP.WEEKS LATER WE CAN’T DRINK ANYTHING OR EATANYTHING AT HOME.WE NOW RUN IN AND GET THINGS WE NEED AND GET OUT AS FAST AS WE CAN .I CAN’T PICK UP ANYTHING IN MY HOME NOW FOR THE FEAR OF BEING SWORMED.BUT IT IS NOT OUR HOME ANYMOER WE CANT EAT,SLEEP SHOWER OR EVEN SET AND WATCH A MOVIE!I WISH OTHERS COULD SEE THE TEETH.BUT YOU HAVE GOT TO LOOK IN THE AIR.UTILL YOU HAVE LIVED THE NIGHTMARE MABE YOU CANT SEE !I DONT WONT TO SEE ANYMORE!! ALL I WANT IS MY HOME BACK AND MY RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MAN I LOVE !THAY HAVE TAKEN EVERTHING AWAY .THERE IS NO TIME FOR ANYTING BUT THEM. WE CANT GET AWAY FROM THEM. I AM NOT CRAZY I AM NOT CRAZY I AM NOT CRAZY.BUT IF I CANT FIND A WAY TO GET AWAY! I WILL BE CRAZY!!!!!IS THERE ANY HELP OUT THERE?
We’ve had this trouble for years and I have tried about everything. What I do on bad nights is sleep on a pad on the floor covered with a tight weave blanket over which is a normal blanket. Then I use powerful fans to cover my body with wind. The no-see-ums can go through blankets or find their way under them where it is not tucked in tight. But it takes them time to do this and with the wind they don’t have the ability to navigate to find these openings. The wind keeps them off my face. Another thing I have done is to seal off a back bedroom with duct tape around the doorsills (bad for finish) as well as seal up the air vents and windows. Even when the windows are closed they can get in. In the evening as it cools outside the house, the warmer air inside the house expands relative to the cooler outside air. This causes warm air streams to move from inside the house to the outside. This carries the carbon dioxide you exhale out with it. The little monsters simply act like salmon and swim up these air streams. The small cracks around doorsills or in the construction of your house are like giant doorways to them. Just as spiders get in – the no-see-ums simply follow the same pathways. Duct tape stops them. But to clear the sealed room of them I use a powerful fan that chops them up by messing up their wings.
By the way – most air conditioners blow them in. They can also come down open chimneys, and hot water heater vents. They follow your scent and carbon dioxide as it wafts out of your house.
Over the years I have used sticky tapes, no pest strips (worked well except it got to me too) and the water traps. I used to have a light fixture that when I used two100 watt bulbs in it I would at the end of a week dump out of it hundreds of tiny little tan-brownish things that looked like very tiny brown rice – then I used a magnifying glass to view their ugly little bodies.
BRING BACK DDT. I am certain these things were not around when I was a kid because of DDT. But as it finally wore off and washed away from the environment after 25 years the little monsters made their return. I read of old accounts in the 1800s about them being in the same area I now live. Obviously something took them away from my area when I was younger – and I am certain it was DDT.
I have been putting vineager and a drop of dish soap in dishes and caught a lot of gnat looking insects but still am being bitten. ?Will these die out when the weather gets colder> This is driving me crazy.
Hi I am from Singapore…yes there is a small nature reserve at the back of my apartment. The insects have been driving me nuts. I have fumigated my house, car, office at least a dozen times. I tried insecticide, vacumming and blastig the fan. I am relly tired. Please help me….
Hey guys,
Going to book mark this but it seems like we are all in the same boat with the same issues with no solutions. Just like the poster above me these lil’ buggers woke me up this morning after only getting 3 hours of sleep and won’t let me be… I can’t see them but I know they are there! I have a dog, but he’s on flea medication, just moved into an apartment but the floors were professionally cleaned, etc. I’m going to take all my comforters, pillows, etc to the laundry mat today, bug bomb the house, wash all the clothes and the dog, and go from there I guess… I don’t know what to do but if you figure it out please post back, I feel like I have a million things crawling all over me biting me and I can’t sleep or do anything…
I live in Toledo, OH and the townhouse I rent also seems to have this problem. Though I have not experienced the red welts that some are talking about, I feel “things” on my skin that make me itch. I’ve started observing this a bit closer, and it seems that whatever it is stays near the floor. We have (fairly new) carpets throughout our house, and the itching is most intense on my feet, ankles and lower legs when I’m standing in one place for any length of time. This also occurs in my kitchen, which is not carpeted. My biggest concern is that the problem seems to be getting worse. Where at first I only felt them while standing in the bathroom or on the carpet, now I’m beginning to feel them on me at night. In fact, they’ve just woken me out of a dead sleep and I decided to get online to research the issue. Though we have a cat, he has been recently sprayed for ticks/fleas, and he is an indoor cat. We also have a bare, finished floor basement, and though I have not experienced this itching whilst down there, I do not spend any length of time there. The weather has been unusually warm this fall, and I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the matter, though I think not, as the little buggers persist through cold-spells. As many others have noted, I am the only one who seems to feel these ‘no-see-ums’–my husband thinks I’m crazy. Unfortunately our vaccuum is less than adequate, but I will try vaccuuming more often to see if it fixes the problem. Another thing I should possibly note is that our townhouse is fairly old–they were built in the 1960s.
Answering the three questions above:
1. there are fields in our area, though not next to our townhouse
2. we have carpet in most of the house
3. wood molding
Keep posting…the more people talk about this, the more correlations between situations can be drawn. On this issue though: there is such a wide range of geographical locations being described that I can’t help but wonder if we’re all talking about the same bug (coastal vs. inland, city vs. non-city, welts vs. no welts, flying vs. ground, etc).
~Jessica
I can not believe how wide spead this is. I live in Indiana and I only had this problem one other time, but I bet it was 20 years ago and I don’t know what we did. Like everyone else, I’m the only one in the house to get bit, however my husband can’t think I’m nuts because I am covered with bites. We just got them though and it’s the end of September, I find that odd in comparison, however we had a very dry summer and we’re getting more rain now. I’m sure that this doesn’t apply to a lot of you if you live in apartments and such, but I hang out all of my laundry, so I am wondering if thats how I got them. That I just bring them in! I can’t believe there isn’t a way to get rid of them. I don’t like chemicals so I don’t intend to use a bomb, I read on one of these to try vinegar in a bowl with dishsoap, I think I’ll start there and report back if anything works!
I live in a small town in south central British Columbia, Cache Creek B.C. I also have a small acreage some 80 ks away near Kamloops BC. Between my wife and I were still trying to figure out where I was attacted by these insects and yes we suspect they are noseeums as both properties have a waterway small creek running through. Both properties are in a semi dessert arid geographic – we have cactus that is native. I lived for 10 years prior to 2006 on a lake south of this area but geographically different to this area – more rain forest like and never was bitten like I was of recent. I as of a couple of days ago have at least 100 little freckle size dots on my ankles, knees and arms and have scratched so much that my skin feels like sand paper. the strange thing is that i did not acually feel the bites, i think the itch came later, i’ve heard that they bite with delay defense so they can fly off before you feel them, I don’t know?? After the itching started I quickly started wearing pants and long sleve shirts and still two days later I was finding new bites but they have finally stopped and I am in the healing process (happily and hopefully) My wife has not experienced one bite just me! I suspect that if any of you do not actually feel the bites till you start scratching it may be due to their (noseeums) deferall defence system that allows them to dine on you while you don’t feel it, its just a possibility. I will recommend one product – and no I don’t work for old spice but I did read on another web site that Old spice stick deoderant will help with the itching and surprisingly it did for me , could be because of time and healing is kicking in but for me it did seem to work. In the end I just say that this whole experience was truly extremely uncomfortable and I came very close to admitting my self to a hospital
Thx
Hal & Karen from BC
I live in Winter Park, FL on a lake and at first I thought I had fleas, although I have no dog. The probelem is very cyclical, they get worse, then not so bad, but they are always there. I am not nuts, in fact I taped my windows shut to try to get proof and dozens of them died on my sills. I have kept them in the freezer in an envelope until I can find someone to actually identify them, although I know they are no seeums. They are little black flies, with clear wings, they move so fast, one can’t see them until they are dead. They are in my hair, they get in my pant legs at work, They drive me nuts. I have tried tea tree oil, have bombed and bombed and bombed, dish soap, even flea shampoo. I was in AZ for a week, thinking the low humidity and dry heat would help kill them, ah no. I have 100% wood floors in my house, no carpet, keep it very clean, am a clean person. Help. It has been an 8 month problem.