Just a thought but do you think adding breathers to your buzzer patterns really makes any differance to your catch rate or are they be better without.
I must admit i only do a few with breathers but cannot really say that this improves the buzzer in anyway,just a confidence thing i reckon trying to imitate the naturals.
These are minute on the real thing so do the fish actually see them at all and are we fooling ourselves by adding them

I never had any confidence in breathers because as you say they are very small on naturals, however at the start of last season I started using a new pattern where the breathers were tied in figure of 8 style across the hook (and cut very short), rather than the normal pointing forwards. Don't know why, but it just looked right, turned out i had my best start to the season and it was a lot more enjoyable fishing (and catching on) buzzers rather than pulling lures like everyone around me. Maybe it wasnt the breathers that made the difference but it outfished my normal breather-less buzzers and therefore had the most important ingredient for a fly, confidence!

Interesting post, i dont really know ive used both types of Buzzers,
Its the same, is a Buzzer thorax of say, Dubbing or Peacock herl,
Better than a black thread thorax with Goose Biots or Orange Paint.

I've found that the epoxy buzer out fishes the herl thorax style buzzers better, but no differance if either have breathers or not.

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Tight Lines.
Brian.

Can see the point of adding breathers at the head, to initate the natural. Never understood why the same material was used as a tail? I assume it is to imitate a shuck. Why a sunk buzzer would be trailing a shuck is rather confusing. Can see the point if it was an emerger pattern fished in the surface film, and even then I think it is pushing it.

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It is in truth not glory,nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting,but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with his life.(Declaration of Arbroath, 1320)

What is going to blur the issue is whether or not the fish take the buzzer as a midge pupa or as a lure.

If a buzzer with breathers is retrieved in fast pulls or figure of eight in my view it becomes a lure and stops being a midge pupa but the breathers may actually increase the lure's effectiveness.

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“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

Mr basher you could have a point, I like many have caught Stockies on Buzzers,
And i dont think some of these Fish had ever seen a real Midge Pupa.

I always tie in breathers as they even stand out on a buzzer shuck. As to whether they're more effective - I doubt it.

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How poor a thing, sometimes I find,
Will captivate a greedy mind - Isaac Walton.

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I always tie in breathers, like a bow-tie, as they even stand out on a buzzer shuck. As to whether they're more effective though - I doubt it.

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How poor a thing, sometimes I find,
Will captivate a greedy mind - Isaac Walton.

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*****©(