We just had lunch on the patio of a little restaurant. My partner noticed that there were baggies with water in them hanging from the tops of the pillars that support the tin roof. Now, maybe we’re the only two people who had never seen this before, but it was new to us. A fellow diner told us that the bags are there to keep flies away, and she swore that it works. Does this work? If so, how?
Maybe they raise mosquitoes in the stagnant water and the mosquitoes eat the flies?
“The inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it impossible for science to provide a scale of values.”
Robert Pirsig
Maybe that’s not water in those baggies.
i’m in texas and i have seen them in old bar-b-q houses, and i tried it. it seems to work but it may be phsychological. i’ve heard it’s because when lite passes through the bag, the reflection of the water makes it look as though water is everywhere, which flies don’t like, or something like that. also it’s supposed to only work if suspended with white string
And hung up at midnight on a full moon!
I worked at a BBQ place for three years and we always had problems with flies during the summer. The last summer I worked there, we did the whole baggie thing, and the number of flies did go down. May have been a bad year for flies, may have been psychological, but whatever it was, it seemed to work. And that was enough for the manager.
–Tim
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
My parents have a bunch of these things in their backyard; they’re not a repellent, but a fly trap.
The way they work is pretty simple. You put a small chunk of meat in the bag, pour in enough water to cover it, and hang the bag up in a tree or something. As the meat starts to rot, the smell attracts flies, which drown when they attempt to land on the water. When the trap is full of dead flies, you trash it and put up another.
My parents say that since they started using the traps, they’ve had less trouble with biting flies. The traps are pretty disgusting from close up, but neither the smell nor the pile of dead flies are noticeable from any distance.
Laugh hard; it’s a long way to the bank.
Are you sure the dangling bags aren’t a “Moving objects that scare off the flies” thing?
In Australia the herders wear corks dangling from around the brim of their hats to keep flies off their faces, right?