Danish scientists can at least give you the answer to the second question; it’s all got to do with the way you smell.

“The mosquito is attracted to carbon dioxide and heat,” says Karl-Martin Vagn Jensen, leader of a team of scientists who are currently working at the Institut for Plantebeskyttelse og Skadedyr at Aarhus University in an interview with Ekstra Bladet. “And that’s what we humans all expel. But they are also attracted to certain scents.”

In tests at labs it showed how mosquitoes reacted to a variety of different scents, some of the scents the insects shunned, some they liked. A lot. Unfortunately the Danish scientists have yet to pinpoint exactly which scents the mosquitoes liked the most. In the meantime, Vagn Jensen thinks that eating a lot of garlic might prove successful against bug bites since garlic has a tendency to cover our natural scents. But the only really effective aid in not getting bitten is the commercial bug repellents. “They contain scents that confuse the mosquitoes, that’s why they don’t bite you if you use them,” says Vagn Jensen.