Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Off Topic: Insect Bites and Lemon Juice

I don’t usually blog off-topic, but this is seasonally useful, so I thought I’d share.

I just discovered today that rubbing lemon juice on insect bites helps relieve the itching and apparently the swelling too. I managed to get about a dozen bites this weekend and was looking for a natural remedy. I’ve been rubbing lemon juice on them every couple of hours and the itch has gone away. Amazing!

I found the tip here, along with 45 other suggestions. I chose lemon juice because it was the only thing I had handy, and was much more convenient than a suggestion I found on another site, which was to eat rattlesnake meat for a week. Don’t you love the internet?

And now back to our scheduled program….

Comments

  1. Interesting – I’d heard of a baking soda-and-water paste for bee stings, but have been getting big mosquito bites lately (never did as a child!) so I will have to give this a try! Thank you. 🙂

  2. My grandmother used to keep a little dish of vinegar on the kitchen counter for that purpose. We’d come in from playing outside, covered in mosquito bites, dip our fingers in the dish & dab it on the bites. Worked like a charm. Of course, we wound up smelling like fish & chips, but…! ; )

  3. Yup, tried the vinegar last night, too. It worked, but my cat wasn’t crazy for the smell. I tried basil leaves this morning, but that wasn’t so effective, however the toothpaste worked like a charm and the smell is much better.

  4. I like having a natural remedy for this. Thank you for sharing. 🙂

    As a massage therapist, i used to use BioFreeze frequently. I stopped because it has parabens & other nasties in it. I switched over to natural products to use instead. But i had found, quite by accident, that BioFreeze is very effective on bug bites. So i keep a little on hand for that use.

  7. I have also just found biofreeze to be great for insect bites, I usually use teatree and aloe vera gel to soothe bites but this one is bigger than the usual mozi bite and I thought out of desperation to stop the itching and swelling, I would try biofreeze as had nothing else to hand. It really has helped cool it down and stop the itching. Well worth a try.