How big was this horse fly? :eek:
Something over an inch. No ruler used at the time.
And then some. Earlier this year I stayed with friends in a beautiful, secluded part of Melbourne. The height of Summer, with temperatures hitting 109 degrees. I swear I was bitten alive by every single one of these 200,000 species. Nothing bad happened to me (no infections or anything), and besides my holiday was truly wonderful in every way. But yeah, this world has plenty of beasts that fly and bite, and Oz is a great place to meet them.
Oh, minor correction to the above. I’m one of those people whom mosquitoes ignore. I’ve walked around in warm ‘mozzie season’ weather in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, seldom attracting so much as a single mozzie. They just don’t want to know. But everything else seems to just live to bite me.
I had a good thread about flies, picnics, and how long until the food has maggots at a picnic. I think it was 8 hours to hatch. It was for the all day company picnic, which ran about 14 hours.
Sorry about that, I pasted the wrong URL. Here’s one about stable flies.
My main point was just that there are flies that look very much like House Flies but differ in that they bite. You would have to look rather closely at the fly and its mouthparts to tell them apart. House Flies (that is, the particular species that goes by that common name, Musca domestica) don’t have biting mouthparts and can only sort of lap stuff up.
Out here in the irrigated desert, the house flies seem to love your hair the most. Everyone I’ve mentioned this to seems to have noticed it. Why would they like that most?