Flies

[Annie456]

I live on the top floor of a victorian conversion and lately we seem to have lots of flies (house flies).  Is this a particularly bad time of year for getting flies and how can I get rid of them?

[mrs.pudding]

We suffer exactly the same problem!  Hordes of the damn things in the attic bedroom.  We used to chuck a couple of those Vapona things into the roof space but they aren't sold any more.  Now I squirt practically a whole can of fly spray in there, then do the same in the bedroom and retire for a day (leaving the door closed).  The hoovering up is fun.  Last year I had to do this about three times before the problem stopped.

My partner is a builder and he says that quite often they find thousands of them in winter, in old roofs - hibernating I suppose.  It seems that the central heating encourages them to wake up and head for the warm area.

[smudge]

If you live in the UK, then it does seem odd to find them buzzing around this time of year. I found a dead one on the kitchen floor only yesterday & that was a surprise! I can only recommend fly sprays.

[brachiopod]

Did they all appear roughly around the same time?

It could be that something has died in your roofspace, has 'blown' (ie had eggs laid on it by flies) and now the flies are hatching out. Sounds horrible, but they're actually doing you a favour.

Our cat once brought in, shall we call it a 'big mouse'? The cat hadn't killed it outright and it escaped under the floorboards and died. Of course, soon after there was a horrible smell, but this very quickly went.

Admittedly, sevearl days later (this was the summer) there was a load of flies for a couple of days. But I preferred a couple of days of flies to weeks of the putrifying animal smell. The flies (well, their larvae) had done a very effective job of clearing up the body.