House Flies

The common housefly (musca domestica; musca is Latin for 'fly') does not have a friend in the world. It makes mammals' lives difficult in every country in the world where it is warm enough to support them. House flies are a nuisance and a danger, because they transmit diseases.

House Flies

One of the problems is that people learn to live with house flies and forget to see them as a serious threat

But dangerous they are, because house flies breed very quickly and are as happy sitting on faeces or a dead rat as they are sitting on your food. They can lay up to 500 eggs at a time and have a breeding cycle from egg to adult of about two weeks.

Since houseflies have a life cycle of about a month, you can see that they can be grandparents before they die with a family of a quarter of a million.

Luckily, these carriers of disease have many species of predators such as lizards, spiders, frogs, toads and some birds.

If it was not for these friends of man, we would be overrun with house flies and, since they serve as one of the most common vectors for transferring germs to human beings and other animals, we would all be a lot sicker a lot more often.

Houseflies are even more disgusting when you realise that they taste their food by spitting saliva on it and then trampling it. They do that with dung, corpses, fresh fruit and cooked food equally happily.

They transfer many parasitic, viral, and bacterial diseases in this fashion. Getting rid of house flies is more difficult and more challenging than with say, mosquitoes, because of the domestic nature of these insects.

You can go around spraying fly killer, in fact they used to a lot 30-40 years ago, but it is not healthy to be breathing in these insecticide fumes on a regular basis. You can squash the odd one with a fly swatter and that is quite satisfying too.

But the only real way of reducing their population is to learn better hygiene. Put all decaying organic matter and domestic rubbish in sealed bags before you dispose of it so that the flies cannot get at it.

Houseflies not only eat moist organic material, they also lay their eggs in it. The eggs then hatch into pupae or maggots which have a ready supply of food. If the food is not there they cannot breed.

If you keep animals, clean up their mess and waste food regularly especially if you have dogs or other pets. Flies are attracted to anything that is starting to rot. Females lay eggs in this.

Targetting the unborn fly is a way of cleaning up our domestic living space and reducing the nuisance and disease that typifies house flies all at the same time.

In order to do that, it is very important to know where the house fly lays eggs. Mostly it lays eggs around dead and decaying organic material. Is eggs are whitish in colour and the larvae are yellowish.

Examine your surroundings to determine which places could be appropriate mating and breeding grounds for houseflies such as places where there is garbage or faeces - places like stables, pigsties and rubbish dumps.

Cleanliness is the first step to take in action against these pests.

Always keep rubbish bins and compost heaps covered and never let them become places for such insects to feed and grow. You should always dispose off your garbage with proper care.

There are also mechanical devices that you can use to kill adult house flies like sticky tape hanging from the ceiling or shelves, although they can be unsightly and the electric fly traps that attracts with a blue light and kills by electrocution.

And last but not least there are beautiful plants that eat house flies, for example the Pitcher Plant and the Venus Fly Trap.