Have you ever opened your garbage can and found 50,000 maggots? Each one of those suckers becomes a fly if you don’t get rid of them. If you dump them on the ground they just crawl away and become a fly somewhere else.
Is there any spray or “reasonable” chemical that can kill fly maggots? The only ways I have been able to kill them are by frying them with a blowtorch or smashing their gooey little bodies. The blowtorch is fun but the neighbors think I’m strange enough already and it takes a long time to hunt down the maggots. Some of them are pretty quick and get away.
I have soaked them in fly spray, mineral spirits, acetone. I don’t want to try hydrofluoric, sufuric or nitric acid because I don’t want to destroy everything around them, just them.
What is it with these things? How are they so tough? One little sniff of fly spray, and a fly is gone. Maggots just laugh it off. (Tiny little high pitched laughs.)
Actually, IMO they most likely would not continue to develop into flies right there on the ground. It’s much more likely that about 2 minutes after you dump them out and leave, every starling, sparrow, robin, grackle, and pigeon in the neighborhood will discover the tasty buffet you’ve laid out for them. End of maggots.
Scoop them out with a shovel and leave them in a big conspicuous pile in the alley or something.
How come you have such a bad maggot problem, anyway? Put your trash in Hefty sacks.
Ummm… well, I guess WHY this happens so often you need a reliable way to kill these buggers isn’t my business.
But, you can just drown them. Fill it halfway with water and you can sit there and watch them drown. Hell, you can even be evil and push the little bastards back down that try and crawl up and out of your fiendish pit of maggot death.
CandyMan, who can now do without lunch.
Only once, and that was a can that was half full of rotting garbage and water. Gawd that was gross. (I’m note sure of there were 50,000 of them, I didn’t look long enough to count.)
I usually dispose of my organic waste (food scraps and cooking waste) down the garbage disposal. This way, my trash can is mostly full of “dry” trash: junk mail, paper towels, empty milk jugs.
And I don’t put loose trash/garbage in my garbage cans. Everything in it is bagged, except for the occasional piece of trash I might throw in while outside.
My can is also Rubbermaid with a locking, well-sealed lid.
This seems to eliminate the maggot problem.
I DO use Hefty bags and I HAVE Rubbermaid cans with lids that fit tightly but I also have very clever racoons with very good noses. They open the cans, throw the stuff all over the place. I repack it in another bag. When the maggots hatch, believe it or not, the little slimes still manage to find their way out. I have watched them on the ground and they get to cover faster than the birds can finish them off. If they are near full grown (which seems to happen VERY fast with maggots which I have rarely seen anything but full grown) I am pretty sure they will pupate or whatever they do and soon become flies. Yes, I put concrete block on the lids but sometimes we forget and sometimes the racoons are very hungry and just knock the cans over.
One of my landlrds once kept a garbage can full of rotting food. There were maggots in it, so we dumped in some incredibly toxic stuff. The effect was to drive all the maggots out in a mass radial exodus. It was possibly the most disgusting sight I ever saw. We ended up stomping a lot of the littl bastards. This is highly effective but gross. Before you depth-charge a garbage can full of the beasts you might want to set it in a tub full of something more instantaneously toxic, like tiurpentine or acid.
So, it seems to me that your problem is more of the raccoon variety than the fly larvae variety. The maggots are merely an innocent secondary problem. What you need is some good raccoon spray. The spray from a shotgun should be sufficient :). Seriously, though, I think you should concentrate more on the raccoons than the maggots.
troub, I’m sorry, but you’re incorrect. There is no such thing as an innocent maggot. Magoots should even have to take the blame for other bad occurrences with which they had nothing to do.
Ah, Necros, it seems you’ve not yet heard about the medical applications of maggots. 
Bob, you can get a good raccoon repellent, Raccoon Away, from http://www.whateverworks.com that will cut down on your furry animal problem. It’s a sticky brown spray that will resist being washed off your garbage cans by rain. My parents were having a tough time with the masked critters, and this seems to be working pretty well.
I work in a fruit fly lab, so we like maggots. They become flies, which are fun. I can attribute to the toughness – in order to pass them through quarantine (mites are a big contaminant in Drosophila labs), we take 30 larvae and bathe them in 70% ethanol for 5 minutes. We then wash and repeat, and they go right back in the vial no problem. Of course, this kills nearly everything else.
Napalm 'em. That’ll kill anything.
Napalm, Gasoline, probably even denatured alcohol. With or without combustion.
Toss 'em in a coffee can, and roast 'em en masse.
You could also go to a farm supply store and get some Sheep or Livestock Dip. That should kill 'em.
A strong mixture of water & ordinary liquid dish soap should kill them.
But my way’s so much more fun…
Just put up a sign in your front lawn FISH BAIT. In the winter maggots are known as wax worms and mousies.
I had this problem a couple of times back when I didn’t have a garbage disposal… Believe me, almost nothing* is nastier than opening a garbage can and finding a million maggots. <reminiscent shudder> Anyway, my garbage man in those days suggested ammonia. Worked nicely. I opened the can, sprinkled in about 1/4 bottle of ammonia, and popped the lid back on. I splashed the ammonia around the rim of the can, BTW, to catch the suckers that where trying to escape. It killed the ones it touched immediately and, after the lid was on, the fumes got the rest. Thereafter, I was much more careful about wrapping and sealing the garbage before I dropped it in the garbage cans.
*One thing grosser than finding maggots in your outside garbage cans is finding them in your inside trash cans… This happened to my sister-in-law. Her [then] husband forget to take out the trash (which included some leftovers from the previous night’s dinner) before they left on 2 weeks vacation. This happened in San Diego – in July… When they got home the entire kitchen floor was covered in a carpet of maggots… The ammonia worked for them, too. But, first they had to sweep the little bastards into a dust pan, dump them into a covered bucket, then fume them to death and empty the bucket into the dumpster. Dozens of loads of maggots… yuck. Sue said they had nearly a 55 gallon drum full. She still has flashbacks.
Jess’s idea about the ammonia is a good one. Usually straight ammonia will kill just about anything, and splashing some around the base of your garbage cans will also discourage raccoons and other critters that like to raid garbage cans.
Failing that, I know most wasp and hornet sprays are made with a petroleum base, to make them stick to the nests better. I’ve killed wasp larvae with them (knocked down a nest and found a bunch of the squirming little s.o.b.'s inside), so they may work on fly larvae also.
But I’d try the ammonia first.
Am I missing something? Where do you all live where you have outdoor garbage cans that don’t get emptied frequently enough that you get maggots in them? 'round here, garbage is picked up once a week. I throw pretty much anything in the indoor/outdoor garbage can, and it gets thrown out looooong before any maggots appear.
Maggots can appear very rapidly in the summer. One week is more than enough time to generate a large and truly disgusting crop.