Several years ago, as a photographer, I took part in a vintage car rally in Denmark. It was not so much about who would come to the finish line first, but about your ability to dress in such a way that they would pay attention to you.
It all ended at the camp on Myehn Island - lunch, dancing and lots of booze. After a few hours (and a few drinks), it seemed to me that it would be nice to take a nap on a lounger under the stars shining in the night sky.
It was then that I made three important discoveries: a) ferocious mosquitoes in Denmark in the summer; b) these mosquitoes bite you easily, even through a shirt or a deck chair fabric; c) when we start drinking alcohol, for mosquitoes it is like a signal for dinner.
My back was covered in bubbles, so to speak, as a memento of my trip to Denmark. Not at all the souvenir I planned to bring home.
American Mosquito Control Association, 2002 study showed that the likelihood of being bitten by mosquitoes increases dramatically if you drink alcohol.
That study (a very small one, involving only 13 people) showed that those who drank a bottle of beer were more likely to land on mosquitoes.
The reason why mosquitoes are more attracted to drinkers is not yet very clear.
We know that mosquitoes are attracted to us by two chemicals we breathe out - carbon dioxide and octanol (an organic substance belonging to the class of fatty alcohols).
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But this brings us to the next question: does the mosquito that bites a drunk person get drunk?
Oddly enough, despite the fact that mosquitoes have been drinking our blood for thousands of years, almost no one has researched this issue.
Entomologist Tanya Dapki of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, told BBC Future, "I suspect not, because a person's blood alcohol level will be very low."
However, if we want to find strong scientific support for her words, there will be, to put it mildly, not very much research.
Patsy Stone, a frequent drinker on the comedy series Absolutely Fabulous, once remarked, "The last mosquito that bit me was forced to go to an alcoholic rehabilitation center."
However, in reality, insects are extremely resistant to the effects of alcohol.
In a recent article in Popular Science, entomologist Kobe Shal of the University of North Carolina points out that a person who drank 10 drinks of alcohol could have blood alcohol levels as high as 0.2%.
But if a mosquito drinks the blood of such a person, the results can be neglected - the insect, when bitten, drinks an extremely small amount of blood - the equivalent of drinking that alcohol, diluted to 1/25 of its strength.
Evolution has helped mosquitoes. Any liquid other than blood enters a separate digestive sac where it is decomposed by enzymes.
So it is highly likely that alcohol will be neutralized even before it begins to affect the insect's nervous system.
“Many adult insects have a sort of goiter where they store whatever fluid they absorb,” says Erica McAlister, senior curator in the insect department at the Natural History Museum in London. “Enzymes break down everything harmful - both alcohol and bacteria, and after that the fluids gradually enter the body.”
McAlister, who wrote The Secret Life of Flies, has already come across the subject while studying the effects of alcohol on fruit flies.
These tiny insects are very attracted to rotting fruits.
“I don’t know if mosquitoes get drunk, but we can see it happening to fruit flies,” McAlister says.
“They are definitely drunk, but their resistance to alcohol is very high. In small doses, it makes them hyperactive and playful. In addition, they become less choosy when choosing a partner. At a high dose, they just turn off."
Mosquitoes are also partial to rotting fruit, which forms alcohol as sugars ferment.
Only females drink human blood to provide the amount of protein needed to lay eggs.
Males and females also drink the nectar of flowers (mosquitoes are the main pollinators) and use the sugar from the nectar for the energy they need to survive.
Sometimes this nectar is also broken down by enzymes into a small amount of alcohol.
Depki says it's an interesting question for her - whether drinking alcohol makes us more attractive to mosquitoes.
Some people are genetically predisposed to biting mosquitoes more often - it is believed that there are 20% of them.
One such genetic trait is blood type. For example, one study found that people with the first blood group were bitten by mosquitoes twice as often as those with the second group.
Other risk factors for being bitten are high body temperature, pregnancy (possibly related to body temperature), frequent deep breaths (carbon dioxide), and larger body size.
Mosquitoes also care about where they bite. Some prefer legs and arms, others, attracted by the release of carbon dioxide from your nose and mouth, prefer your neck and face.
“I went to Costa Rica and a mosquito bit me on the sole of my foot! - Dapki recalls indignantly. "How is that?"
But perhaps the main chemical signal to mosquitoes that emanates from us when we are drunk is ethanol released in sweat, according to a 2002 study.
A similar experiment was carried out in 2010 in Burkina Faso with the participation of 18 people. He confirmed that mosquitoes are considered attractive to drinkers.
Ethanol, released in ultra-small quantities along with the sweat of a drunk person, can serve as a signal for biting insects that food is served.
The report of that study said: “Exhaled carbon dioxide levels and body temperature do not make people more attractive to mosquitoes. Despite the individual differences in the volunteers who participated in the study, beer consumption consistently increased the attraction to mosquitoes.
“If you’re hungry and wandering around the city,” says Dapki, “there is a high probability that you will head in the direction from which you smell of food - for example, hot dogs. You may not want to eat a hot dog, but the smell shows you: the food is somewhere here."
The presence of alcohol in the human body may look like an invitation to dinner for mosquitoes, McAlister says, but the main factors attracting insects to you are probably in your genetic code.
So avoiding ice cold beer most likely does not guarantee you will get rid of annoying mosquitoes.
Probably, what you drink will even help you survive their bites easier: in a state of light intoxication, they will not itch so painfully.