The worst thing about feeding hundreds of mosquitoes on your own blood is not the itching – if you do it enough times, your body gets used to the bites. It’s not even the pain, although it is always painful since the mosquitoes will use their snouts to root about your flesh in search of a blood vessel.

It is more that, sometimes, the little suckers take their time.

“They just walk around on your arm. You’re sitting there and thinking, ‘Seriously? I have things to do’,” says Chiara Andolina.

Andolina is an infectious-disease researcher who works at the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, a world-renowned laboratory nestled in an unassuming town near Thai–Myanmar border. She runs the Unit’s insectory, where mosquitoes are bred,