Well, tick season is here again in North Carolina. I’d say almost every other day my dog, Bandit, comes in with another tick. The first one I saw on him was last week, the tick had stuck its mouth-part into the inside flap of Bandit’s ear. We got a small jar, the tick-pick and bottle of Young Living’s Palo Santo essential oil and set out to get this nasty little bugger off of my beautiful boy.
Bandit is a mix: Flat Coated Retriever and Irish Setter. He's extremely smart and has a fantastic personality. I highly recommend this breed.
Curt held Bandit’s ear while I opened the bottle of Palo Santo (we know from experiences last year that Palo Santo is by far the best for killing ticks). I tipped the bottle so that a single drop of essential oil would fall on the tick, we waited, and waited, and waited… NUTS – the bottle was empty!!! Since we couldn’t find a full bottle we tried our hardest to get any last little bits of the essential oil out and onto the tick. This ended up being an interesting experience and here’s what we discovered…
We couldn’t manage to get one full drop out of that empty bottle of Palo Santo, I’m not even sure it was a half a drop. Still ’some’ did get on the tick. It’s actually kind of interesting to see what happens… moments after a drop is dripped onto the tick it looks as if it is doing what I can only describe as… doing a ‘nose-stand.’ The tick hindend actually goes straight up into the air so it looks as if he is standing on his nose (mouthpart). Shortly afterwards the tick will lower its hind end parts and begin letting go of the hold it has on the skin with its mouthpart.
This time was a bit different, the tick wasn’t dying and letting go – no doubt due to the fact that we hardly had any Palo Santo left in the bottle. So, Curt pulled the tick out with our tick-pick and put the tick in our ‘experimental tick jar.’ The tick was still alive and stayed alive in the jar overnight.
Young Living's Palo Santo Essential Oil
Curt had been rooting around in the basement the next morning and found a full bottle of Palo Santo essential oil – YIPPIE!!!! We looked into the jar, where we had put the tick and it was still alive. So I added 3 drops of Palo Santo to the jar, within 3 minutes the tick was as dead as a door nail.
That confirms what we discovered last year… it requires one full drop directly on an embedded tick to kill it so it lets go for easy removal. You can read about our experiment from last year here.
Last night I found a tick embedded on Bandit’s neck. We pulled Bandit’s hair back (so the Palo Santo essential oil would make good contact with the tick)and put one drop on it. Within a minute the tick went straight up (doing its nose-stand thing) and about a minute later slowly lowered and began to let loose. We easily pulled the tick off and put it in the jar. Within 3 minutes it was completely dead.
So here’s the trick: Put one drop directly on the embedded tick and be patient for about 3 minutes, then you’ll be able to dislodge the tick easily (I think if you were even more patient and also have a patient dog that you would actually see the tick drop dead without having to easily pull it out). Then, just for good measure, take the tick and put it in a jar that contains 2-3 drops of Palo Santo essential oil. Bye-bye tick!
Young Living Essential Oils is the only essential oil company distilling Palo Santo, you can purchase Palo Santo at my website TheVeryEssence.com
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July 11, 2009 at 8:01 am
Gloria
Evelyn,
have you tried this with other oils? Thieves also kills ticks on contact. My assumption is most oils will kill a tick. The real question is what oil will keep it from climbing on you and biting.
Hi Gloria,
In our experiments last year we tested – Peppermint, Purification, and Palo Santo. We used each oil individually (never together) on embedded ticks, and live ticks we found walking on us and on Bandit. It didn’t matter how much of the oil we used, the only oil that actually killed the tick was Palo Santo (and it only takes one full drop that’s a direct hit on the tick).
We also had 3 glass jars, each jar contained 3 drops of each essential oil separately. This is where we would put the ticks we scraped off, they were walking live ticks (not embedded). We watched the jars to see how long it took to kill them. After two weeks worth of ticks (and we had many) none of them in the Peppermint or Purification jar died, they were still very much alive. And yes, we would swish the essential oils around to coat the ticks in the jars.
We also found that the ticks in our Palo Santo jars didn’t even have to come in direct contact with the 3 drops of Palo Santo. Just being trapped in the air-tight jar with the vapors of Palo Santo was enough to kill them within 3 hours – and they fought to try to get out of the jar.
Unlike the peppermint and Purification jars where they just walked all over and directly into the little puddle of essential oil, which hardly phased them at all.
We found that right after applying one drop of either Peppermint or Purification an embedded tick appeared to make them quite unhappy and looked like it might die, but they never did. Well, they never did until the pattern of the sun shifted enough so that sunlight struck the jars sitting on our front porch – they got heated to death, but that was after sitting in the jars for two weeks, very much alive.
It was only the ticks in the Palo Santo jar that were dead very quickly, some as quickly as 2 minutes.
What we saw last year was enough to confirm in our minds that this year we only need to grab the bottle of Palo Santo and not waste our other oils.
Try it and see what your results are. Our results were so bad with the other oils that I came to the conclusion that the people who said Purification works didn’t bother to watch long enough to find out the true results.
Yes, I too assumed that Purification oil would dislodge and kill the tick I found on the back of my neck last summer. That’s why I brought my bottle of Purification over to my neighbors house the morning I woke up and found/felt a tick lodged in the back of my neck and asked him to apply 2-3 drops of Purification on the embedded tick.
After applying ’several’ more drops and some 20 minutes later the tick had not died, nor had it budged. My neighbor had to go to work so he pulled the tick out with tweezers. Imagine my dismay when the Purification didn’t do a thing!
That’s what prompted us to experiment and find out what does work. I’m sticking with Palo Santo. ~ Evelyn
October 15, 2009 at 11:03 am
Glass Bottles
Thanks for sharing this method, I’ve never used essential oils for tick removal. This seems like and effective and safe way to do so. I will have to give it a try.