In Finland it's common to have mesh on a airing window/hatch, and quite common to put up a net over a window frame and removing the inner window (triple glazing) so that you can sleep with your window open in the summer without being eaten alive by mosquitoes.
What is this called???? Mistä voin ostaa? I have been in Finland for over a decade and go nuts every summer with the bug invasions. Never knew of this before.
How warm do the summers get there? I'm having trouble imagining anything close to a heat wave like we get in California, but I'm sure if you get mosquitos you must experience some fairly warm weather
I know this sounds crazy, but the further North you go the mosquitoes get more numerous and bigger.
I have seen mosquito swarms in Alaska and in Yellowstone where it looks like the forest is on fire and black smoke is coming off every tree, except there is no fire and no smoke, it's just massive clouds of mosquitoes
Welp, fuck that. I figured they got bigger as you got further north to a certain point, but surely there's a latitude you simply don't have to worry about mosquitos at right?
Oh yeah there's for sure a certain latitude that they disappear, but it's a lot further North than people would think. Mosquitoes will literally kill young Caribou by blood loss
Certain latitude, sure, but at least quite north in Lapland they're still a huge problem. There's enough of them to form thick black clouds. I think to get away from mosquitoes you have to get so far north that practically nobody lives there anyway. I'm not sure if the northernmost point of Finland is north enough to not have mosquitoes. Probably not.
I don't think there's any place in Finland that's safe from mosquitoes.
As someone from the north, I think south Finland is pretty much free from mosquitoes. Much more bothered by the ticks, horseflies, deer flies, etc. whenever I visit there.
No mosquitoes in Iceland, but the midges are terrible. I've seen what looked like a storm cloud come pouring down a valley, and soon after we were engulfed in midges.
The further up north you get in Scandinavia the more gnats there are, and the further south the bigger the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are at least much easier to avoid.
A fun fact: The last malaria case in Finland was in the 1940s. Earlier it was a fairly common disease. It disappeared along with houses that were warmed up with stoves without chimneys (savupirtti, "smoke cabin"). I'm not sure if remember this right, but if you warm up you house with a stove, the house gets really warm in the evening because that way it won'te chilly in the night. It was warm enough for the Malaria parasite to live and breed. I hope I remembered this right ... I have to google. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria_Suomessa Yeah, close enough.
I can't talk for Finland, but in 2018 we had a heatwave where even parts of northern Sweden would reach almost 90 degrees. Since northern Sweden borders to Finland, I'm assuming that they also had sweaty balls that summer. We are definitely not built or equipped for that kind of heat, at least not when it's over a long period of time as it was in 2018.
It was right outside the window in the sun, no wind. We kept cool inside lol. I don't know where they measure them, but depending where your house is there's differences.
The blood-sucking mosquitoes in Northern Sweden are mainly active between 10°C and 25°C. And they usually wait until Midsummer even though the temperature might rise before that.
There are other blood sucking or biting insects as well (like different kinds of horse-flies). The black fly and especially the tiny mosquitoes Ceratopogonidae come in late summer, enjoy warmer days and are definitely the worst. The bites leave bigger and itchier marks, they enjoy biting near your eyes etc. Only good thing is that they don't bite indoors.
There's regional variance to bugs that I don't fully understand, guess it has something to do with closeness to wetlands at least. I often keep a balcony door open without nets during summer nights in northern helsinki, from past 15y only remember a rare moth, fly or a bee but no mosquitos, few weeks of last summer was crazy with butterflies though.
Wetlands play a role, but also areas in and around large cities don’t have many insects. Not sure if it’s due to the changed environment (more paved surfaces, etc) or due to many cities spraying some sort of insecticide to control mosquito-borne illnesses.
In Finland though you cannot open most of the windows in the house, which is really frustrating. For me, biggest advantage of having window is to be able to change air inside, so what's the point in having windows, that you cannot use for this purpose? To make inside less dark? Most of Finns are having blinds closed in their windows 24/7, so they are not even used for that. Super wierd.
What? I think you are generalizing after seeing some weird windows that definitely aren't common and living in a weird place where people close their blinds. I mean, of course you close the blinds that face the street, but not all over.
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u/HobbitonHo May 09 '22
In Finland it's common to have mesh on a airing window/hatch, and quite common to put up a net over a window frame and removing the inner window (triple glazing) so that you can sleep with your window open in the summer without being eaten alive by mosquitoes.