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If you’re heading outdoors, wear long sleeves and pants to minimize skin exposure. You may also want to wear clothing and any additional gear, like backpacks or tents, treated with 0.5% permethrin. If you’re dealing with fleas at home, you may want to wear insect repellant and vacuum your bed, carpets, and upholstery frequently to minimize fleas.

Bed bugs bite your body to feed on blood. When they bite, they inject an anticoagulant, which is why you may see blood stains on your sheets if you have an infestation. The bed bugs tend to bite in clusters, so the bite marks will look like itchy, red spots in zigzagging lines of three to five bites per cluster on your skin.

The bites are itchy, but for most people, they do not cause serious or long-term health complications. Itching the wound excessively could lead to an infection, and some people are allergic to bed bugs.

Spiders have lots of scent-sensitive hairs on their legs. Scented oils they aren’t fans of can act as a natural spider repellent to help keep their populations at bay when you rub them around your home’s entry points. Studies suggest mint and chestnut oils are two scents that spiders hate.

Scorpions can be drawn to your home for a number of reasons, and it depends on the type of scorpion you’re finding. Often, scorpions check out moist areas that attract their prey, including insects like cockroaches, crickets, and moths. If you’re looking for scorpion hotbeds in your home, start with cold and damp places like crawl spaces, attics, or behind appliances.