Flies

All flies, like bees, have a four stage life cycle: Egg, larvae, pupae, and adult. Some live as adults for only one day, but most survive for five days to four weeks with only a little, moist food. Some, like horse flies and mosquitoes, have pierced, sucking mouthparts and feed on blood, but most are scavengers that aggressively seek out exposed food and lay their eggs nearby. The hatchlings are flies in their larval form and are often called maggots; they are very small, wormlike creatures that feed on a variety of foods, from fruit to carrion. When the larvae are fully developed, they pupate and change into adult flies to start the life cycle all over. Commercially available fly sprays are very invasive and are usually only marginally effective. The most responsible methods of fly control normally involve screening them out of houses and cleaning up their food and breeding sources such as dog droppings, uncovered trash cans, and similar fly magnets. A fly control machine will normally utilize light attractants combined with electric, sticky, or other traps. The problem is that they typically attract many more bugs than they control.

House flies have always been associated with our Southern Californian lifestyle. They are very plentiful and much more than just an annoyance. We should be most concerned about their unsanitary habits and their capacity to transmit diseases and illnesses such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery and diarrhea. They are also known to transmit other parasites such as pinworms, roundworms and hookworms. House flies are small (1/4 th inch) grey to black insects with two pairs of wings that are different lengths. They hang around lights, windows and damp areas of the house and search for food that they can absorb with their sponge like mouthparts. A housefly’s method of eating makes it a potential disease vector because it can pick up germs from garbage, sewage and fecal matter and then regurgitate, defecate or simply transfer those organisms by leg or mouth to human and animal food.