Aled Owen and Stuart Bennett, breeders of
Midge's parents, and, right,
Midge with Shaun Richards and buyer Eddie Thornalley
Work in the laboratories at Swansea has now shown that the V275 strain of the fungus has potential for use in control programmes as it also kills the adult
midge, with some applications in the laboratory having a 100% success rate within five days.
Even when she herself could no longer play,
Midge continued to welcome amateur, and the occasional professional player into her home in the most recent years, usually to play with her daughter Alison, whose cello playing was a source of great pride and pleasure to her.
It comes during what is becoming a busy year for
Midge - he's just finished a stint on ITV1's Popstar to Operastar, alongside Steps singer Claire Richards, Erasure's Andy Bell, Cheryl Baker of Bucks Fizz, X Factor winner Joe McElderry, and Melody Thornton of the Pussycat Dolls.
The study concluded: "
Midges are known to rest in trees after they have emerged from pupae and are found in greater numbers with increasing height.
"Obviously we can't clean all the
midges out of Glenveagh's 40,000 acres.
The experimental line Ob 677, the source of the resistance in BG 380-2, imparts resistance against the gall
midge population prevalent in Sri Lanka (Kudagamage and Gunawardena, 1989), biotype 1 and 2 prevalent in India (All India Co-ordinated Rice Improvement Programme, 1999), and against biotypes 1 and 2 prevalent in China (Huang et al., 1998).
"If the
midge transmits the virus in all three ways, then it's likely that it's a very efficient transmission vector for VSV in nature," says Drolet.
Midge kept those raw tapes and a couple of years ago shocked Sting by replaying them for him.
Research carried out by Dr Blackwell's team estimates that more than half of tourists visiting Scotland for the first time are put off returning because of
midges.
Terry Gunn of Lees Ferry Anglers ([800] 962-9755) recommends #20-#24 dry-fly patterns to imitate single
midges, and #18 Griffith's Gnats to imitate
midge clusters (clumps of
midges balled up together).
My experiments in a western New York marsh further develop those themes by simultaneously evaluating the influences of plant litter resources (bottom-up) and fish predation (top-down) on benthic
midge distribution and abundance.