Dealing with the Fistigruff's table manners

`Beware the Fistigruff, my son - the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!" This is a line Lewis Carroll might have coined, if he had been offered that irresistible word. "Fistigruff" is Connemara for midge, and possibly a mutation from piastai crudhach, the stinging, bloodletting insect. Of the three or four candidates on the wing just now, the one it fits best is Culicoides impunctatus.

This is the commonest biting midge of the bogs, plague of forestry workers, ESB linesmen and anyone else who has to sweat on regardless. Scientists insist that the trigger for midge activity is light level, with a critical threshold of 260 watts per square metre. Once irradiance falls below this level, in cloudy weather or at dusk, out come the swarms of midges from their resting-places under leaves.

But I must equally insist that they are abroad in brilliant sunshine, hovering in calm corners of my vegetable patch and waiting for perspiration to dilute whatever repellent I have lately placed my faith in. On a gorgeous day in early summer, full of bumblebees and birdsong, I just cannot take as seriously as I should the simultaneous, prickly assault by a dozen or so pregnant females, each hungry for one-ten-millionth of a litre of my blood.

They would be welcome to it and more, were it not for the feud now long in progress between my immune system and whatever proteins midges have in their saliva. There are people who can picnic on the lawn every evening and never get bitten by anything; I envy them. There are also the first-time visitors to Connacht who are bitten but scarcely notice it. This is because their immune systems have not yet been sensitised to midge saliva; their next encounter will be more irritating.

My own reaction, after all these midgy summers, is a quite excessive rush of antibodies in the blood, falling over themselves to neutralise the foreign proteins and repair the tiny punctures. For a couple of days (and nights) last week, my forearms were quilted with a dozen hive-sized bumps, all itching intolerably as the immune system pumped in the histamine.

The standard commercial salve for summer insect bites is an antihistamine cream, but this was one of the times it failed to work. Neat lavender oil did much better and left me in a swoon of fragrance. But the real soother was the gellike juice squeezed out from a chunk of aloe vera: a window-sill "first-aid plant" brought home from Portugal by a friend.

This succulent tropical lily, or agave, with its spiky rosette of fleshy leaves, has a herbal history going back to the ancient Greeks: Pliny was one of the millions who have used its juice as a purgative (I am not recommending this). Today it is grown in commercial plantations in the Caribbean and Africa, and is the basis of all sorts of lotions and skin creams. But domestically, above all, the fresh gel from a broken leaf brings instant salvation from sunburn, or kitchen burns and cuts, and goes on to help the skin heal.

There is something specially satisfying about using one raw product of nature to counter the impact of another, and drug companies are not slow to cash in on the reawakened, half-educated fashion for herbs. "Contains aloe vera" is prominent on the bottle of one popular insect repellent, as if the plant extract were doing the repelling and not the multi-syllabic synthetic chemicals listed in the fine print on the back.

For almost half a century, two chemical compounds, developed originally for anti-mosquito campaigns and abbreviated as DEET and DMP, have formed the basis for most midge-repellents on the market. They replaced the fragrant essential oils expressed or distilled from plants: lavender, geranium, eucalyptus, thyme - above all citronella, from lemons, which the Forestry Commission in Britain once supplied in gallon jars.

I use this sometimes, blended with a skin cream. It does need renewing rather often, but does smell sweeter than another recommended herbal alternative: swallowing regular cloves of garlic so that its oils impregnate the system and exude through one's skin.

Of the two standard chemicals, DEET is the more potentially toxic, and work goes on to find new repellents, preferably more innocent in origin and biological in their action. Scottish universities are a particular focus for research into midge behaviour, since Culicoides punctatus continues to harass the tourists and many outdoor industries.

At Aberdeen, for example, a zoological team headed by Professor Bill Mordue is studying the pheromones produced by the pregnant biting midges, and the biochemical impact of azadirachtin, an insect repellent extracted from the seeds of India's remarkable neem tree.

Few plants in the world have provided such versatile benefits as this tall, tropical "tree for all seasons". Millions of Indians use its twigs as an antiseptic toothbrush, its oil goes into soap and spermicide, and it repels about 200 kinds of insect, from locusts to boll weevils. Several extracts of neem have been patented by US companies as pesticides.

The application of an Indian herbal remedy to the behaviour of a Scottish biting midge may seem, at the moment, to be of little more than academic interest. But as the "typical" tourist of the West of Ireland becomes, perhaps, less tolerant of such native fauna, who knows what biological devices will be urged? As a resident of Connacht, I don't know which phenomenon of summer I dread most: the midges - or the tourists.