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With the current fads for essential oil aroma therapy, it's easy to get an ounce of 100% pure, organic nutmeg oil. Amazon will ship it to your door even while you're quarantining yourself.
I put a few drops on the hat I wear when I walk Caz to see what happened.
The deer-flies still dive-bombed me, but they never landed on me. The canine control surface got the usual quantity of bugs.
From this limited experiment, I conclude that nutmeg oil works as an insect repellant. After a couple days, I started to have the flies land on me again, so I replenished the oil. The next walk was fly-free.
As a side effect, the room where I hang my hat smells much nicer now.
Unfortunately, the article I read did not specify which components in nutmeg oil are active. Knowing how hard it is to run bioassays like this, I'm betting the researchers don't know what's the most active ingredient.
One of the projects I worked on when I was doing insect pheromone work at SUNY ES&F was to isolate the active component from a particularly sticky goop that made house-flies vomit.
I asked Dr. Silverstein why we were doing this. Was there a plan to use this stuff as a repellant, perhaps for use in dairy farms?
He looked at me, with his eyebrows rising. "Clif, there's no application for this. It's pure SCIENCE."
It's hard enough to figure out what attracts a bug, I'm not sure how you'd do a bioassay for something that repels them. Smear it on a pile of feces and see if they refuse to eat it?
At one point, before I worked for him, Dr. Silverstein worked with cockroach pheromones. He mentioned that the bioassays didn't work. It seems that cockroaches are attracted to anything new and different.
He showed us a film made by some Red Chinese researchers who claimed to have discovered a cockroach sex attractant. They had a box with roaches, and a bit of filter paper with the attractant on it.
They'd put the paper in one corner of the box, and all the roaches scurried to that corner, except one roach that wandered randomly around the box.
They moved the paper to the other corner, and again all the roaches skittered to that corner, except one.
They did this several times, and then you saw a researcher's hand smash the wandering cockroach.
We thought it was as much a political message as a scientific one.