01 — The founder
Sam couldn't stop asking questions
Sam — the founder of Wild Bunch Naturals — is a tour director and traveller who has spent years leading expeditions through the most mosquito-dense corners of the planet. Jungles, river deltas, high-altitude villages, bush camps. The kind of country where the mosquitoes have their own frequent-flyer program.
He noticed the pattern somewhere between those expeditions and a fairly deep rabbit hole of Incan, Indian, indigenous Australian and Sicilian traditional medicine. The knowledge was never lost. It was just sitting there, quietly ignored, while synthetic chemistry took over.
02 — The pattern
Everyone had already solved it
Different continents, different centuries, no way of comparing notes — and yet the same answer over and over: the right plants keep the mosquitoes off.
- Rural India. Cow dung, dried and burned at dusk — a slow, clean smoke that has kept verandas bite-free for generations.
- The Australian bush. Eucalyptus smoke on the fire — and lemon eucalyptus, used across Aboriginal Australia long before it turned up on any approved list.
- Sicily. Zagara, the orange blossom, pressed into oil and worn on skin since before anyone thought to write it down.
- Africa & Australia. Termite-mound clay, applied by indigenous communities as a barrier against biting insects for generations.
Every ancient culture with a mosquito problem found a solution — without a single lab, patent or pyrethroid.
03 — The honest part
Not everything that works is on an approved list
The EPA's approved list exists because someone paid to test those ingredients. Nobody is queuing up to spend two million dollars proving what Sicilian grandmothers and Aboriginal communities have known for centuries. That's not a gap in the knowledge. It's a gap in the funding.
Science hasn't caught up with nature yet. That's not nature's problem.
So we use what we can — the ingredients where the history and the paperwork happen to overlap — and we're honest about the rest. Termite-mound clay isn't on the EPA's radar. Neither is Zagara oil from a hillside in Sicily. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
No synthetic pesticides. No pyrethroids. No DEET. Old knowledge, properly packaged, for people smart enough to ask for it.
Wild Bunch isn't trying to reinvent anything. Nature did that already — we're just paying attention.