Flies

I live behind a couple of horse farms. They are pretty, and provide a lovely[sup]*[/sup] country smell. Unfortunately, they also attract flies. The flies have been extreemly bad this year. I smoked some ribs this weekend, and now my garage is full of flies. I almost expect Beelzebub to show up any day now. They are getting inside my house.

How do I get rid of them, or at least to get them to go somewhere else?

  • For unusual values of lovely.

I live on horse property, and I can tell you from experience, that there is no way to get rid of flies. That said, files strips and those stinky file traps can catch enormous numbers of them. Also, if the horse owners have chickens, they can really help keep the file numbers down - maybe you can buy them some.

Fly strips are gross but really do work.

ETA - you will, however, catch yourself. It’s nasty. And then you’ll rip the strip down trying to get away and step on the thumbtack with your bare foot. Don’t come back and say I didn’t warn you.

If you are on good terms with your neighbors, you might suggest that they use fly predators. They’re teeny, tiny little wasps that parasitize fly pupae and can dramatically reduce the population. There are several companies (googling fly predators will bring them up) who send you the wasp pupae to spread around the manure pile and other prime fly breeding places. Unfortunately, they work best if you start in the spring before the fly population has really taken off, but it might be a subject worth broaching. However, it will do you no good to get them yourself, unless you plan to sneak over to their properties and spread them around.

If you want to knock down the population of little demons in your garage quickly, try going to a hardware or feed store and getting a pyrethrin/permethrin (I always get them confused) based spray – you can get aerosol cans that you spray into the air like air freshener that are very good at wiping out all insect life in a short time, whereupon you can open up the garage and air it out. The only downside is that you will have hundreds of little corpses to vacuum or sweep up (although flies don’t stink like dead mice do).

Other than that, just remember, it’s a sign of down-home country living when you have fly strips hanging in the kitchen. :smiley:

What you should do is use Buhach. My dad always bought it and it worked like a charm. He’d burn it in a foil pan in the garage and bingo, no flies.

Y’all got a twenny-two?

My father had advanced the idea of smoking a cigar in the garage, but alas, he had none. He had already been informed by my mother there would be no smoking of cigars at Mrs. Magill’s house.

I have, but I don’t like the idea of shooting dozens of little holes in my house. :slight_smile:

I’m off to the hardware store to get some fly strips.