Watch as the essential oil of catnip used in our Five Barn Farm Tick and Insect Repellent frustrates this tick from leaving the safety of the untreated blue tape.
The composition of this repellent has been developed at Five Barn Farm in upstate New York. The formula is based on the essential oil of a plant that grows widely as a weed, Nepeta cataria (catnip) dispersed in olive oil, the original product, and recently dissolved in rubbing alcohol to be used as a spray.
For now we are both purchasing the oil, which has been analyzed by gas chromatography in our barn-laboratory on the farm, and also obtaining the oil by extraction using steam from plant harvested on the farm here. The details of this plant's capacity to repel ticks has been determined in collaboration with vector ecologists Dr. Thomas Daniels and Dr. Richard Falco of the Calder Center of Fordham University and Professor James Ciaccio of the Fordham University Chemistry Department. The engineer at the farm is Richard Klebes. Please see the video above, which features a starved tick desperate to get onto a blood source (Professor Green's arm which has catnip oil on it ... He is Emeritus Professor of New York University Tandon School of Engineering)
The effect of catnip essential oil on insects is beyond question. Our experience here on the farm, and other peoples' elsewhere, demonstrates repellent activity against every pest encountered, including the flies that plague the eyes of cows and horses. Furthermore, as reported in Chemical and Engineering News, recent research demonstrates the reason for the repellent activity of catnip oil: Mosquitos feel pain when exposed to the essential molecular component of catnip oil. In addition, according to recent scientific work published in ScienceAdvances, cats appear to take pleasure out of exposure to catnip and related plants, fundamentally, for repelling biting insects.
This property of catnip essential oil on insects was documented as early as 1964, in "Science" by Thomas Eisner of Cornell University, who wrote: “Surely a mint plant derives no benefit from an ability to stimulate cats.” This makes sense. Plants, over hundreds of millions of years, have evolved to produce chemicals, called secondary metabolites, to repel nectar feeding arthropods. It is reasonable for us, who came along much later, to use these chemicals, these essential oils, to repel arthropods feeding on our, so to speak "nectar," that is, blood.
On Five Barn Farm, we are also growing and extracting the essential oil of Tagetes minuta L (Mexican marigold), which we had earlier shown to yield an essential oil that kills the larvae of the mosquito that carries various maladies including Yellow Fever and the Zika virus.