I genuinely want to eradicate every midge on the planet.

I met some Norwegians who couldn't understand what all the fuss was about, nowhere near as many as they get🤷‍♂️
.
Also, repellents are hopeless, get a net. Or a lot of bats.

Midges . Great for keeping Scotland from being over run by visitors.

Also I've not met a single person who's blood the midges don't prefer to mine so as long as I keep a sacrafice near by I'm safe enough from the swarms.

Typically it’s only the women that bite, apparently.

They fulfil an important ecological role.  Without any natural predators, rambler numbers would become unsupportable and village shops across the region would be systematically emptied of their mint cake and ultimately destroyed by angry mobs when supply chains can't keep up

There are far worse things than midges. Current candidates for Tory leadership for example.

Typically it’s only the women that bite, apparently.

🙂

I genuinely want to eradicate every midge on the planet

So why do you keep feeding them?

Typically it’s only the women that bite, apparently.

And it's part of the breeding routine.

Just saying.

My skin swells up with every and any bite from the little bundles of joy

Keeping an after bite pen handy and using it quick is advisable.

I seemed to hit a point where I stopped reacting to bites. I just get a flat red dot now where I've been bitten - like I've been dabbed with a bingo marker - but they no longer swell or itch. The turning point seemed to come after a having some really quite bizarre reactions to mosquito bites in the south of France. As in a dffierent weird reaction to to each bit - blisters with blisters inside, that had blisters inside , or  weird radiating scribbly black lines, all sorts of weird shit- old men in the villages would gather round in cafes and pojnt at them with their pipes and mutter  in hushed tones. Anyway after that I seemed to stop reacting to midge bites. So you could try that.

i am a natural midge repellent, scientifically proven and i still hate them.

I've got one of those traps; they work - but they don't seem that well built. Especially not for the money. Broke after a few years, I think it's repairable, but I haven't got around to it yet.

Welcome to Scotland,wait till you meet Mr and Mrs Cleg,the midge will pale to insignificance 😉 😀

I react to them. I take a puritan after any and use anthisan topically on it for a day or so. I find catching it early enough with the antihistamine to be quite effective

You take a Puritan? Hard to swallow or do you just rub it on?

I take a puritan after

Sounds a bit sinful.

This seems the right place to ask something I’ve been wondering about for a while.
Midges eat other animal’s blood and because they are small I assume they don’t need much to fill them up but…
high on the Cuillen ridge (or other high Rocky Mountain) where there are no deer or sheep there are millions of the buggers. What do they all eat? There aren’t that many climbers and walkers surely?

I’m a midge magnet, my wife is a midge repellent. First day in Banff one summer and they were swarming around me. We stopped counting after 100 bites that night, and she had literally zero. I was covered in deet but didn’t seem to help. I’m itchy just thinking about it.

So... Nobody here has persuaded me that the wee ****kers should survive Anbrosemageddon (TM).

The wee horrors love me. Did 10 under the Ben one year and counted 400 bites on one leg. I just wear longs in summer now, avoid singletrack and carry a midge hood to wear if I get a mechanical. Clegs and ticks belong in the same fiery pit of hell, wee shites.

So… Nobody here has persuaded me that the wee ****kers should survive Anbrosemageddon (TM).

No, feel free to kill them all off but make sure your solution is applied worldwide and not just the UK...

What would bats and swallows eat if you kill off the midge?

Smidge works btw

Does Skin So Soft still work?

Skin so soft works for me

I just bought one of these for Glencoe.
Hopefully it helps along with the Smidge, Avon, nets, Ak47.

Current Smidge-midge-forecast. Where am I heading? That's right, the only orange bit on the map! 😳🙄

The smokin’ midge definitely helps but the cones only last 20 mins at a time so you spend a lot of time messing around with it. Good in conjunction with everything else though 👍

All you need to do is take out the source

You can get rid of midges if I can get rid of ticks

You cannot get rid of them. The poor bats would starve as would swallows. A vital part of the food chain midges are.

Use smidge. Its a game changer

Living on the west coast we’ve been almost midge-free all summer - even this morning where there’s barely any wind, just a couple buzzing around the dog as she’s sat outside. Ticks have been bad as we’ve had a very mild winter.

I'll take midges over clegs any day. Smidge and a net and the midges are OK, but I got swarmed by clegs at Culra 4 years ago and it was horrendous. They bite through your clothes and my legs looked like I'd been attacked with a chainsaw.

Use smidge. Its a game changer

☝️
Plus, be careful around where you camp / cafe choice / break spot. I find that a) they're not that bad most of the time b) you can avoid them regularly and c) smidge, net and thin gloves = bearable.

Does Skin So Soft still work?

it works in preventing bites - theres no magic ingredient in it, it just by making you too slippery to bite. What it isnt is any kind of repellant so midges are still a nuisance. Smidge is a bit best of both - has that a bit of that oily quality (but not as strangely unctuous as SSS) but also stops you attracting them so dont swarm around you as much.

I suspect the people happy to live in midge zones treat them as a handy way to keep Southerners like me away.

I react to them, last time I went to Scotland I came back 20% bigger from the swelling, (a quick way to check if I'd look ok carrying some timber) but it does render some absolutely beautiful places a no go for me. 😔

Like the poster up there asked 👆what do they eat apart from tourists? Sheep?

Won't you think of the bats

tjagain
Full Member

Won’t you think of the bats

What if we could eradicate the biting species and leave the rest, would that interest you?

What do they all eat? There aren’t that many climbers and walkers surely?

The highland midge is unique (I think) in being able to breed without a blood meal.

So they are biting us just for fun.

I’m a midge magnet

me too, if that's not a typo.

I usually get absolutely eaten alive, but this year camping in kielder it wasn't half as bad as previous years. I only got around 20 bites all week, which is a miracle for me.

-Smidge worked the best
-DEET did **** all
-Covering up is vital, long trousers, tucked into socks, long sleeve top etc.
-Net over the head, although this does get in the way of eating and drinking, which I do lots of when camping

Guy at the campsite office said they have those midge machines, and it's really helped reduce the numbers apparently. I remember thick black swarms in previous years but this year wasn't that bad.

Midges just leave me with a red circle (as someone above said) so I'm not overly fussed. Cleg bit my hand yesterday, this morning looks like it's been slammed in a car door. Only good thing is they are slow and lumbering I reckon I get 20 of them for every bite.

My Irish mother calls them flying doctors.

take a puritan after any and use anthisan topically on it for a day or so

Careful. The affected area may flower.

You can get rid of midges if I can get rid of ticks

Definitely ticks first. As TJ notes midges provide food for bats etc but I am not sure how ticks contribute. Aside from being a vector for seemingly every vicious virus out there.
That said I guess they can cut down on meat eating when passing on one of those viruses.

Careful. The affected area may flower.

Quoted for recognition 😎

I usually get absolutely eaten alive, but this year camping in kielder it wasn’t half as bad as previous years.

Worst place I've ever had them is Kielder. Stayed there on the way up to the highlands and it was horrendous. The highlands was actually totally fine.

Those midge machines in Kielder are disgustingly covered in the little dead bastarz.

Worst I ever had was in N Wales. Abbing down a dank gully dressed in shorts, no shirt after climbing a route on Gist Ddu. Thee ropes jammed and we were just wiping the horrors off of ourselves. It was like a disgusting midge and sweat paté. It got so bad that we abandoned the ropes and came back another day to recover them.

Also remember that Smidge was partly developed from the fact that Bog Myrtle keeps them away. Indeed the smell is similar.

Our old garden had bog Myrtle across the back fence - and noticeably fewer midges in that area.

I usually get eaten to bits, but...
Last night I was at loch of lowes down the road from Moffat, surrounded by a cloud of the buggers and didn't get bitten at all, not once. I don't know if they're the 'wrong kind' of midges, or if my sons Lynx perfume, sorry, body spray, kept them from biting but it was a Huge relief.

up in the top end of Kielder this week and they only seem to have come out the last couple of days. doing a cheeky lap this morning up some logging tracks, didnt expect the wagons that early but they were loading so I waited until they were done and the swarms came out.
horrible little buggers

Nope, still nothing - had a warm, sunny day, there’s little wind and a bog / standing water nearby - been out cutting the grass in shorts and t-shirt and nothing biting

We used to go camping in the Lakes all the time when I was a kid. My Dad never got bitten by midges.
He smoked a pipe though.

I just bought one of these for Glencoe.

From the video -

I don't like repellents because they taste terrible

Maybe he should stop trying to drink the stuff 😆

Out in the garden again this evening, for about ten minutes. B#####rds.

@tj, the bats will have to adapt to the new order. Adapt or die, sorry.

Hmm 🤔, I sound a bit harsh. However I do not want a Venn diagram where midges and I intersect.