Meet my mortal enemies.
I grew up in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate NY, in a very heavily wooded area. Aside from having an exceptionally long winter, the mountains are a wonderful place to be. They only have one real flaw.

Blackflies and deerflies.

The blackflies usually start appearing in late May and stay into June before fading out and being replaced by the deer flies, who stay around until August.

Blackflies will swarm around you, and are especially fond of attacking your eyes. They also love to crawl into your hair and bite your scalp, and are very fond of the area just behind your ear. You don't feel them biting at first- in fact, probably you won't be aware of it until they've gone. But instead of poking you with a tube like a mosquito, they chew a small wound in you with their mandibles and drink from the surface, so you know you've been bitten when you rub and itch and your fingers come away bloody.

Deer flies are a bit larger, and fast. Really fast. They circle you two or three times per second until they spot a landing place, and then they bite with a vicious stinging itch. They too love to crawl through your hair to your scalp. And worst of all, they'll chase you- I have tried outrunning them on a bicycle, and the little fuckers followed me along the road for a good quarter of a mile. I have ducked into a building and emerged from another door, and found them waiting on the side of the building around the door I entered.

For reasons unknown, they're especially drawn to me. I got into the habit at an early age of washing with unscented soaps (Ivory is the best) and wearing unscented deodorant, as they're attracted to perfumes, but they still prefer me over other people.

I have been known to go after them with a can of WD-40 and a lighter. I also enjoy catching deer flies and flinging them onto the surface of a lake and watching the fish get them. Once I even stuffed about half a dozen into the barrel of a .22 rifle and fired them into a tree.

I have no idea why God saw fit to create them, but one day I'm going to demand an answer from Him, and might just bring along a few of the fuckers to unleash on His ass...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 24 Apr 2008, 17:09, 4 replies)

Might work
(no guarantees mind).

We have our own mini-beast from hell in Scotland - the midge. These fuckers are relentless, and unstoppable .... until the SAS (yeah, those tough army types who storm embassies for laughs) let out the secret.

Avon Skin-so-soft products. There's something in them the midges can't abide. They'll give the wearer a wide berth and go and plague someone else.

I have tried this (the midge repellant, not the SAS) and it works! With the happy fringe benefit that your skin is in really good condition. Although the look on the Avon lady's face must have been a picture ("How many bottles? Delivered to whom?")

For mosquitos we discovered that they avoid the smell of lavender. And Tea Tree oil.
(TheWeeWitch hasn't been here much recently .., Thu 24 Apr 2008, 18:48, closed)

Yup, I know of that one.
Doesn't work.

However, Burt's Bees makes a very nice smelling insect repellent that does seem to keep them off of you- although they still swarm around you anyway.

Last summer when we canoed back into the bog we wore it, and I had a grand time knocking deer flies into the water...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 24 Apr 2008, 19:07, closed)

aaagh . . . . persistence personif(l)ied
Deer flies truly are persistent li'l bastidges. I was swimming in Georgian Bay (central-ish Ontario, Canuckistan) years back and a deer fly came at me. I ducked under the water, swam away about 20 feet, resurfaced and the li'l bastidge was right there - waiting. This went on for about 10 minutes: me vainly swimming away underwater, resurfacing to find the same deer fly (I could tell by his Def Leppard t-shirt)had followed my submarine progress and was waiting for me to surface for a gulp of oxygen.

Eventually it wore me down. I gave up and resignedly proferred a juicy bit of hairline flesh for its bloody feast. They will win
(ring-finger is also a verb, Thu 24 Apr 2008, 19:22, closed)

They are not of this earth.
There are similar things here in the antipodes which are vaguely known as sandflies or bushflies. They're brown and armoured and look like the spacecraft from Lexx when you see them close up. They love to do the wait-around-knowingly-until-you-resurface thing if they find you while you're swimming and you try to hide underwater.
Also, you can't kill them. They literally re-form like the Terminator. I have crushed one until it looked like a car wreck, surely dead, and then buried it several inches deep under hot sand. The fucker ominously resurfaced five minutes later, shaken but not stirred, and ready for more carnage.
(lonelybadger, Fri 25 Apr 2008, 8:16, closed)