hi Sammy, are you new to Oklahoma? the moving red dots are chiggers. someone can tell you what to use, and I can only tell you what helps me. after working in the garden for a few hours I show with grandmother lye soap. if I do get any I use Anti-Itch clear that I get at Reasor's. Wash your closes in hot water. Stay away from tall weeds or any plant. if you don't mind using Deep Wood on your clothing before going out I would do that. I don't use the stuff. For me I would probably pour bleach water on the patio. But I am not sure. Very hot water and/or a hot hair dryer will get rid of the itch. one year I had 200 bites and only used the hair dryer on one thigh. the next day those bites were gone but my thigh was red from the heat. I couldn't imagine doing that all over my body because I was already feeling the effects of using it on my thigh. Kind of like how you would feel with 1 degree burns over all your body.

Oklahoma Station.

I found a good article "The Truth about Chiggers and Ticks by Kevin A. Shufran, Ph.D.

It is located on Oklahoma Station in a Chapter of Safari Club Int. I don't have a clue as to linking, and could not even find the http: of the website. I have heard to shower, then take a towel, and rub it over your body, especially where there has been elastic. This site recommends a soapy shower.

I hate chiggers.

Sammy

Thanks Jessaka. We've lived here for more than 30 years, but recently I have realized that the reaction I have for chiggers is more of an allergic reaction than before. There is a creek (ravine) behind our house, and there are tall weeds that we have recently sprayed. I have worked hard to weed my plants, and have crawled through all kinds of brush.

Lye soap is rather hard on the skin, isn't it? I will look for it and read the directions. I will also look for the Anti Itch stuff. Thanks.

Sammy, I'm not sure those spots were from chiggers. Whenever I get them, the spots are smaller. Still, perhaps they inflamed and got larger because of your immune system's response.

I've heard many remedies.. But the one which seems to work best for us, is, right after contact, or when you first start to feel the itching, take an Epsom salt bath. That appears to stop them in their tracks.

Most likely, the things you are seeing are not chiggers. Chiggers are so small, I don't think anyone sees them. I am not sure if there is anything you can spray. Here are a couple of methods to avoid getting infested:
1) Wear long pants, closed shoes (not open toe) and spray insect repellent around the cuffs of your pants and waistband. This generally works well. We have used Deep Woods Off, though we are working on reducing our exposure to deet. By wearing socks and long pants, I at least avoid direct contact with my skin. Also, I recently heard that nursery workers around here soak cedar shavings in water, put the water in spray bottles and spray that like insect repellent. I imagine it needs to be re-applied frequently.

2) Always bathe in the evening, after being outside. Hot water and soap seems to kill them before they can do damage.

3) My wife discovered this by accident: after bathing, each day, apply a drop of clove bud oil (essential oil) to the underside of each wrist and and just below your Adam's apple (neck). After doing this a couple of days, the essential oil gets into your system and both chiggers and mosquitoes leave you alone. She went all summer, last year, without using insect repellent, by doing this. I tried it, and it worked for me too... except for ticks. The ticks still went for me. I should give a disclaimer at this point. We don't know for sure, what prolonged exposure to clove bud oil might do.

Okay, hope this helps. I'm sure we have centuries of accumulated chigger experience, represented on this forum. Let's see what others say!

George
Tahlequah, OK

Some people use powdered sulfur or pelletized sulfur to treat areas infested with chiggers. I haven't tried it, so cannot say how well it works, but the folks I know who use sulfur for chiggers swear by it and are happy with the results. Sulfur is not necessarily easy to find, but the place I do see it consistently is at feed/farm and ranch supply stores like Tractor Supply Company or Atwood's. If you do use sulfur, which is simply a mineral and not an insecticide, it has to be reapplied after rainfall.

If you did use chemicals, they would work, and many chemical pesticides are labeled for chigger control, but I don't use chemicals either if I can avoid it, so I never have tried any of them for chigger control. We might have used sulfur for chiggers our first year here, but I don't remember the details of it or if it worked.

Here at our place, the chiggers generally are more of a problem out in the pastures in tall grass, so we help ourselves by keeping wide, mowed paths through our pastures so we can walk through the pastures on the pathways while leaving adjacent areas tall enough so that the wildflowers grow, bloom and set seed. We mow paths 8' wide so that people walking down them can see snakes that enter the pathways so we can avoid the whole stepping-on-a-snake issue.

It is my understanding that the chiggers, which are the larval form of a mite, do not actually burrow into your skin (although I believed that my whole life until I did some research a couple of years ago and learned they do not). They feed on you, injecting their saliva which actually begins digesting your skin. That saliva is what causes the itch.

Normally mites have little zones where they all live together and do not widely infest an entire property, so if you find a chigger mite zone and treat it, you may not encounter chiggers again. We have two known mite zones on our property and I avoid them as much as possible. Since we use grass clippings for mulch, sometimes I get chiggers on me from spreading fresh grass clippings on the garden beds. Once chigger season starts (sometime in May most years), as soon as I spread the grass clippings, I come inside and take a hot shower (as hot as I can stand) and scrub my skin HARD to get them off of me. Since they are very tiny and hard to see, I'd rather be proactive and get them off of me if they are there than to assume they aren't there. I also immediately wash my tennis shoes and clothing in very hot water before I wear them again because the chiggers can hang out on them for a day or two and reinfest your body.

If you didn't manage to scrub all of them off, an old folk remedy that works for Tim is to pour 1 cup of bleach in a bathtub full of hot water (a water temperature of 125 degrees is recommended) and to sit and soak in that for a while---maybe 20 or 30 minutes. He and his cop friends finds this helps them rid themselves of chiggers after they have had chiggers get on them while they were walking through tall grass (for example, searching an area for evidence, a missing person or a body....when you cannot just stop what you're doing at work and go hop into the shower). It even has seemed to help when he does it a full day or two after being bitten by chiggers. I am not sure if it is removing any chiggers on him or if it is somehow neutralizing the saliva injected into his skin.

I tend to get chiggers once a year---after that one miserable experience, I am very careful about staying out of high grass. The one area in my garden where they tend to be a problem is the large flower border at the SE corner of my fenced garden and they'll get on me when I am weeding there. My only real solution is to regularly weed that area about twice a week from the minute stuff starts sprouting there. If I keep the grassy weeds out, which is a challenge since it sits downhill from our neighbor's pasture and grass seed either blows into it or washes into it regularly, I usually don't get chiggers there. If I know there are chiggers there, before I weed, I will tuck my pant legs into my boots and spray my boots and clothing with an insect repellent containing DEET. I do not spray my skin. I do not like using DEET products and I only use them a handful of times a year, but I'd rather spray my boots and clothing with DEET than come inside with chiggers climbing on me and biting me. My body reacts strongly to chigger bites, so I always have a Benadryl anti-inch ointment and ChiggeRx in my medicine cabinet. If you grow comfrey, you can remove a leaf from the plant, break its stem (lower on the leaf is better than higher on the leaf, and rub the Comfrey liquid on the chigger bites. That seems to help.

Finally, if you encounter itchy bites after being under oak trees, especially oak trees that have a lot of galls, it could be that your are encountering itch mites and not chigger mites. The easiest way to tell the difference is that often the bites from itch mites show up on your head, neck, shoulders and arms since the itch mites fall down onto you from the trees. Chigger bites more often appear on your feet, legs, etc. since they climb upon you from the ground or from plants.

I hate chiggers and had a lot more trouble with them when I used to do all the mowing. We had a push mower back then. After a few years here, we bought a riding mower and that put an end to the chigger issue while mowing. Tim does most of the mowing now but doesn't seem to get chiggers while on the riding mower.

Our worst chigger areas are where the grassland meets the woodland, and the closer we go to the creek, the worst they are. I'm not sure why they are on your patio as they tend to prefer grassy areas or woodland areas.

Dawn

Some Chigger Info

Sammy said "Oklahoma Station.

I found a good article "The Truth about Chiggers and Ticks by Kevin A. Shufran, Ph.D.

It is located on Oklahoma Station in a Chapter of Safari Club Int. I don't have a clue as to linking, and could not even find the http: of the website. "

Here's the link for the article at Oklahoma Station.

we used to take a bath with Lysol in the water when I was a kid. clear finger nail polish dobbed on the chigger bite will smother it and stop the itch. It may burn a little .

Try some anbesol for the bites. I also like witch hazel, but you may be beyond that. I have a patch of chiggers where we normally feed birds. My research says chigger mites are a bird parasite. When I have to go to that patch in the yard I rub oil on my legs and feet. Any oil, I have used castor oil and some cheap body oil from target. I guess they can't climb through the oil, and they don't jump, they count on you brushing against something to get on you. If you can't do anything else, rub your legs hard when you come out of the area, it doesn't take much to kill them, but since you can't see them, you just have to rub down any place they might be.

Oh, and the clear nail polish works because it blocks air, so oil will do the same thing without the sting.

You have all given me so much information. Thank you. The one thing I read in the past that has not been mentioned here is that the chigger stays in tissue, not skin.To me they are the same. They stay for a couple of days, and when they drop off, the human body has an allergic reaction. The longer they remain in the tissue, the worse the reaction.

I may have to compromise at some point, but I hate to wear long pants. I don't like to wear the boots, and I don't like to tuck the pants in the boots. I wear pants that come a little below the knee. It is cooler that way. I always wear shoes and socks, but really in Oklahoma, boots are hot.

I need to re think what I need to do.

I appreciate all that you wrote.

Sammy

Jessaka, that's been my experience, this year, exactly. I think I've been pulling about 8 or 10 ticks out of me a day, for the last four or five days. Nothing seems to stop them.

I agree with y'all on the ticks, though I am not seeing as many yet as y'all are. It does seem like an early, busy start to the tick season. Our chickens eat a lot of them in the outdoor areas around the house, but the cats and dogs run through the fields and the woods and come home with ticks on them. Occasionally I find a tick crawling on me in the house that I suspect came indoors on an animal.

An old folk method of preventing chigger bites, used by a very diverse group that includes some men as well as women, including electric utility linemen, hunters, hikers and Army Rangers (Google Army Rangers + pantyhose + ticks to read about them), is to wear panty hose or tights beneath your work (or play) clothes. The chiggers and ticks cannot get through the hose or tight material, but mosquitoes still can still bite you through it. There even are companies that make camo-patterned tights for men in an effort, I guess, to erase the stigma of wearing nylon stockings, even if you are wearing them for protective reasons. I don't think this is a great solution for us because who wants to wear them in our hot, sticky May and June weather when chiggers are so bad, but it beats being eaten up by chiggers.

That may work, but how awful! My best method, but I hate it, is to spray Cutter spray directly onto my rubber boots. I have done this when it is wet out, or when I go down to the ravine with my Round Up, to get high weeds.

I think it would be awful too....hot and sticky! It might work well, but all we need is one more layer of clothing to make us sweat in the heat and humidity here.

Prevention is best. If you do get bites, nail polish. I carry green nail polish in my Scout first aid pouch on the trail. We refer to it as frog blood, and the boys love it.

The most sure way to avoid chiggers is to wear closed toe shoes - boots that reach up your leg are best - with long pants that can be tucked into your boots.. Also tuck your shirt into your pants. Using powdered sulfur in a sock, hit or dust liberally around where your pants legs tuck in and where your shirt tucks in so that you can see the powder on your clothes. If you're going to be in high grass then you must treat your arms as well. Sulphur is a naturally occurring element both inside our bodies and out. It is entirely safe. I keep the sock with a cup or two of powdered sulfur in a can with a lid on it. It doesn't get old or go bad and can be purchased at most any drugstore.