By Per Peterson
Camryn Peterson really hates mosquitoes — so much so that she decided to devote her science project to preventing mosquito bites.
“They’re annoying and they buzz in your ears. I wanted to make a bug spray so they would not bite you,” said Peterson, who joined her fellow sixth-graders and fifth -graders at Tracy Elementary School on Friday for the annual Science Fair. “And the bug bites hurt. Sometimes the OFF bug spray is gross-smelling, so I made a bug spray that smells good and is healthy for your skin. And it doesn’t attract mosquitoes.”
Peterson was proud of the results of her sweet-smelling spray that she said is made out of essential oils.
“One bug landed on my brother and no bugs landed on me and my other brother,” she boasted. “We all had it on. Logan had one bug bite, that’s all.”
Peterson said it took about one-half hour to make the spray, and she then ran a two-week test trial.
“You had to get the right temperature in order for the mosquitoes to come out,” she said. “It was hot one day and we went down to the long stream by our grove. There was lots of mosquitoes.”
The fifth- and sixth-graders’ project filled up all the open space in the elementary school’s media center Friday morning. Later that day, they were to present their projects to the public.
The fifth-graders’ projects were designed with the scientific method in mind, while the sixth-graders were charged with finding a problem and solving it.
For more on this article, see this week’s Headlight-Herald.