Oh, I forgot one of the most commonly recommended (and misery-inducing) ways of combatting midge without using pesticides. It will break your heart to do this, but you can snap off every new new shoot and emerging rose bud just as it begins to appear as new growth. The idea is that by doing this you will prevent the midge from finding an acceptable place to insert its eggs. However, they also sometimes insert them around new emerging leaves. Some people have tried doing this for weeks on end to interrupt the life cycle. This is an example of why midge is considered a horror to deal with, because snapping off all your rose buds defeats the purpose of having roses... but the midge are already doing that, too. It got so bad in my garden about 15 years ago that I contemplated giving up rose gardening, because I didn't have a single bloom from August through October for about two seasons in a row (our roses start to bloom in late May and early June in the northeast). But I had 150 roses, so what was I supposed to do with them?
I've kept at it, and found that if I start applying Chlorantraniliprole in the early spring and continue as necessary, I can minimize the damage to losing about 10% to 20% of my rose blooms from mid July through the end of the season. I also use cedar and garlic sprays when I see the first damage beginning around July (but I'm not convinced the sprays make much difference). Now when I peel open a midge-damaged shoot, I usually don't see any live larvae inside of it. Although they killed off the rose bud, they also died inside the rose stem from consuming the systemic Chlorantraniliprole, and didn't make it to the soil to pupate.
