Life's Great Mysteries - Why do mosquitoes always buzz near my ears?

You know what I’m talking about. Mosquitoes don’t mess around with buzzing your toes, or your buttocks, because that would not be nearly as annoying. A female mosquito beats her wings at about 500 flaps per second. That’s a lot of hard work. She doesn’t want to waste all that hard work unless she can really annoy you and make you slap your own face in your attempts to make the buzzing go away.

Well, as it turns out, there is more to the story than sheer pugnaciousness. You see, female mosquitoes need to drink blood. One good way to find blood is to follow the scent of carbon dioxide. Warm-blooded creatures happen to breathe out a lot of carbon dioxide, and we all know that warm blood is the tastiest blood, right? So, female mosquitoes zero in on the scent of CO2. That brings them close to our heads (because we don’t breathe carbon dioxide out our butts… that’s mainly hydrogen, methane, and hydrogen sulfide… the stuff that makes our farts smelly).

Once the female mosquito is in the vicinity of your face, she then begins to smell something else that gets her tiny little heart pounding with excitement—the odor of ear wax. Ear wax emits a smell that mosquitoes love.

Thus, I have finally solved the mystery, but this doesn’t really prevent me from slapping my own face to get rid of the annoying sound.

Photo Credits:
- Mosquito sucking blood - DepositPhotos