So the past couple of days has seen upwards of 20 flies in my kitchen and always several swarming around my head in the connected living room! They have seemed to come out of nowhere and just keep appearing. I looked and found no food or anything around, and nothing has changed from say, last week.
Any idea where they would come from and why now? Unseasonably warm weather? Any good ways to get rid of them before I go insane with the buzzing?
This is satisfying if not always lethal.
Yeah, I’ve seen that. But I don’t understand how you don’t end up with salt everywhere that you have to clean up.
I’ve never found any salt afterwards. Perhaps the plasma burst destroys it.
What kind of flies? House flies? Fruit flies? Big ones? Little ones?
That happens in our house every once in a while, too. Flypocalypse. Just regular house flies. Lots and lots of them. Buzzing! Ugh! I have no idea what causes it.
I’ve got a theory, and it’s not very pleasant.
My mom has a house down the road that sits mainly unoccupied. Well, with no people, dogs or cats to scare them off, it developed a mouse problem.
So I set traps and laid poison.
Fast Forward a week or two
I open the door. Oh, yeah! We got some dead mice here somewhere! That smell is pretty unmistakable.
Fast Forward a week or two again
I open the door. Hundreds of dead flies all over the damn place! Far, far too many to account for them getting in from outside. I figure they hatched out of the dead mouse corpses, lived their puny little lifespans buzzing around the empty house and dropped dead.
:eek: Pretty disgusting thought, isn’t it?
At night, turn all your lights off, open a door or window (and screen) and turn an outside light on. After a few hours, close everything up. 90% of the flies will be gone (hopefully). It costs nothing.
Are there any missing persons reports in your neighborhood?
There have been many flies in the trash cans lately. Having lived out in the woods, I always tie the plastic tie strip around the bag so that animals won’t be attracted to the garbage, but the flies still find it.
I’m not sure. I’m sure they are not fruit flies (maybe). They gross me out so I only look at them after I’ve hit them with a notebook 6 or 7 hundred times. Hard to get an identification 
They seem to have gone tonight. Unfortunately, i keep imaging stuff 
No smell of dead things at all. No trash around or anything. I’m trying to blame it on my cousin’s dog, but not working too well. In any event, they seem to be gone now. Hopefully they stay away!
We get them in the pantry and kitchen during really wet spells. I hang up a couple fly strips. The look disgusting in a 1950s diner sort of way but the things have worked for me like a charm.
In most places I’ve lived, they usually appear en masse around this time of year, lighting on the tip of your nose, your ear, the back of your neck, your exposed ankle, back to the nose… (Gah!)
This is good advice and it works during the day, too, especially if your windows are fitted with blinds or similar.
You may want to do a more thorough search of your apartment, looking for something that may have fallen behind the fridge or washing machine, for example.
If all else fails and the little buggers have you at your wits’ end, flypaper gets good results.
ETA:
This.
This happened to me a few weeks back. Houseflies show up every year, of course, but I’ve never experienced anything like this before. It was like that scene in The Amityville Horror. No idea why it got so bad; I couldn’t find any food that had been left out.
Fly strips did basically nothing. Caught a few of them, but after several days, the houseflies were still controlling the place. I tried this thing, and again, it caught a few of them, but the problem was still very bad.
Finally, I took the nuclear option: a fly fogger. Totally worked. Coming back home after being gone for the recommended time period, all that was left was to sweep up the fly corpses.
We use a $40 bug zapper that works really well. Only problem is a bunch of dead bugs landing outside the catch tray but those are easily vacuumed up.
I know this is bumping this thread, but I knew I started it, but couldn’t remember the date and I wanted to see if it was around the same time last year. Because the flies were back again for a few days last month. One day, no flies. The next and for the following 5 days, at least 20 flies always between my blinds and the window. And everyday when I came home from work, I’d have to kill 20 immediately, and then throughout the night, more would just keep coming and I would kill them too until no more appeared that night. But the next day, 20 flies again!
I was about to go crazy until after a few days, they stopped showing up. Same type of flies as in my original post.
Really strange 
Damn flies. I’ll find one bouncing off the inside of the window, trying to head to the light I guess. With the intent of trapping it between the window and the screen, I’ll open the window. Off goes the fly into the house, not to bee seen near the window again for hours. We have a/c running so I can’t just leave the window open. I’m thinking seriously about one of those salt guns.
Worst flies I ever encountered were at Uluru (Ayers Rock). Even with a mesh bug screen hat they were maddening. It was there I learned the term “Aussie Wave”.
I like blasting flies with it. Mrs. Plant (v.3.0) doesn’t like pieces of fly being blown about the kitchen, however. They make a stronger bugasalt gun now that surely does a better job of pulverizing the remains.
And by golly, they make a laser sight for them!
This is a park?
A national park. Yes.