Beating a small bug with a big bite

All About August: A new machine promises to tackle midges, so you can enjoy the summer evenings without diving for cover, writes Anne Lucey

Midges - they are called "no-see-ums" in the United States - have a bite out of all proportion to their tiny size. And if you think the midges are worse this year, you may be right. Midge populations fluctuate, as does their effect on humans. And if you are spending more time outdoors because of the good weather, you may come across them more frequently.

Midges matter: there are about 18 biting species in Ireland, but not all of them target humans, thankfully. Some of the creatures, which weigh only about half a microgram, go for deer, others for dogs. Frogs and even other insects are bitten. Midges love boggy, acidic, marshy ground, woodlands, the edges of ponds and everywhere there is vegetation - about the only safe place is on the sea-shore when a breeze is blowing.

It is the pregnant females that bite, usually at dawn - light levels affect their performance - and again at dusk, hungry for our blood products. Midges can, however, bite all night, and they can storm the midday picnic if conditions are damp and cloudy enough.

Rural dwellers find their gardening or alfresco dining cut dramatically short on calm summer evenings as lumps followed by itch set in.

"It's one of the few times when it's healthy to smoke," says Dr Patrick Ashe, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum. It is not that he would recommend smoking: lighting a bonfire is a much better idea, he says.

Keeping to coastal areas reduces your chances of being bitten. "If there is a breeze the carbon dioxide we emit is blown away, and so the midge doesn't detect us," he explains.

Some people attract midges more than others. Some are "more suitable" for midges, Dr Ashe explains, and certain people react badly to bites from midges.

The Irish midge is only a distant relative of the mosquito and does not spread disease among humans. It does spread viruses, however, such as bluetongue, in cattle, sheep and other livestock.

A new machine, designed to ward off mosquitoes in the US, works just as well for midges. It grew in popularity there amid fears about the spread of West Nile virus. The Mosquito Magnet, developed by American Biophysics, is now available in Ireland from Sutton Trading, a Wicklow-based company run by David and Sian Sutton. David Sutton had been searching for a solution to the problem of midges at his home in Glencree, in the Wicklow Mountains, and when he came across the Mosquito Magnet he saw the answer to his prayers. "Come five or six in the evening we would be driven indoors," he says.

There are two models of the propane-powered machine, which, supplemented by a packet of the chemical compound octenol, produces carbon dioxide, moisture and heat to attract midges, which it then sucks into bags.

The machines, which cost about €800-€1,700, depending on the model, will make a difference even after only a few days. When it was put on display at Powerscourt waterfall, the Mosquito Magnet trapped more than six million midges in a few weeks (the number is calculated by weight).

In the US, where many hardware stores have sold out of the Mosquito Magnet, it was described as "the hottest-selling item on the face of the planet this year" by the Boston Globe.

Thomas Byrne, who moved from Dalkey, in Co Dublin, to Glencullen 10 years ago, was nearly driven out of his new home by midges. A stonecutter by trade who likes to work outdoors, he always put his "suitability" to midges down to "the sweet Dublin blood" and says they were the one blip in his rural idyll. "My arms would be like chickenpox. In the mornings and the evenings I would have to run from the house to my car. I had an awful time."

His wife, Deirdre, was not so badly affected.

He had searched scout shops and health stores for remedies, even donning bee-keeper's clothes at one stage. But five weeks after forking out for a Mosquito Magnet - and leaving it on 24 hours a day - he says "that terrible swarm" has gone, although it may take a year to get rid of them entirely from his garden.

Even St Patrick's Purgatory, on Lough Derg, may not be such an endurance test when the Mosquito Magnet kicks in: the prior there has ordered some of the larger ones. Pitch-and-putt clubs are also among the Suttons' customers.

About the only ones to complain will be the bats, or the odd moth, as they feed on midges. But right now there are plenty of the insects to go round.

More details available from www.suttontrading.com