BackNo
Fly's Gonna Lite On Me!
by
Leslie Heulitt
Well
folks, spring is here at Gate Farm, bright patches of tulips, daffodils and
crocuses light up the landscape. The
countryside is turning delicately green, pastures and barns are full of bouncing
babies. Also, slowly buzzing in
sunny barn windows are lethargic flies that have wintered over.
They will feed and the females will lay their eggs, producing in a few
days several hundred or more flies who will lay eggs as early as two days after
hatching to produce an astromical number of descendants in a few short weeks.
All of the sudden spring is over and fly season is fully upon you.
Flies
are annoying and a serious health hazard, suspected of transmitting at least 65
human diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and tb.
Flies are also the vectors of many animal diseases, like E.I.A. and pink
eye.
The
common housefly lives around two and a half weeks in the summer but can survive
over three months at lower temperatures. They
usually range 1/2 to 2 miles from their point of hatching, but can travel up to
20 miles to find food and egg laying sites.
Flies feed on fecal material, discharges from yes, wounds, sores, blood
and any decaying matter like weeds, grass clippings, garbage, kitchen scraps and
dead animals. If it's organically moist and decaying, flies will feed on it
and lay eggs in it.
A
fly will deposit hundreds of eggs in moist decaying matter and depending on the
temperature, these eggs can hatch in as little as 8 hours.
The resulting maggots can mature, pupate, and emerge as adult flies in as
little as two days; then repeat the cycle by laying their own eggs two days
after hatching.
I'm
sure the disgusting habit and lifestyle of the fly is not what comes to mind
while you enjoy the fleeting beauty of your spring flowers, the balmy air, and
the bouncing babies. But guess
what?? Now is the time to start a
fly control program, and get those little buggers before they gang up on you.
Here
at Gate Farm we have a simple and very successful fly control program.
In November of 95 "Lancaster Farming" paper had an article
about a study Penn. State did on fly control.
Always looking for new ideas I read this article with great interest,
only to find they had probably spent a bunch of money and came up with the exact
same methods I have been using for years!!
The
most important part of good fly control program is sanitation.
My aim is to eliminate as many feeding and breeding sites as possible.
The three "C's", clean' cover' or compost are the rule.
Stalls and runs in sheds are cleaned regularly, very little' if any,
bedding is used during fly season, this reduces wet spots where flies breed, and
encourages my goats and donkeys to leave their loafing barns seeking a softer
spot to urinate where urine won't splash up on their legs.
I
am lucky to be able to haul all my manure "up the hollow" in the woods
far from the general farm area. There
it naturally composts and is hauled away by my gardening neighbors.
The next best thing to an "up the hollow" storage site is to
cover your manure piles. During the
winter here large manure piles have grown by tow barns and several sheds have
had manure and bedding pack build up. My
first order of business, come spring cleaning time, is to strip the runs in
sheds to get them clean, dry and disinfected, ready for spring kids and foals.
Meanwhile the big manure piles that have accumulated over the winter are
covered with black plastic and sealed around the edges with boards.
This removes them from the critical cleaning list by preventing flies
from feeding and breeding in the. Also
the heat generated by the covered, composting piles will cook any maggots or
flies trapped in there. So keeping
your manure piles covered will go a long way towards reducing your fly
population. In the Penn. State study they found, in their covered piles,
that the ammonia gas killed the maggots and developing pupae.
They were cleaning u the litter from large poultry houses all at once so
the ammonia was still in the litter. My
manure piles are outside and added to daily so the ammonia is leached out by the
winter weather but the heart produced by my covered piles will kill anything in
them.
Composting
is another way to get rid of your manure, mixed along with bedding, grass
clippings, leaves, weeds, garden waster, and kitchen scraps, (no bones or meat
please) can't give manure away but you can sell compost! There are lots of ways to compost depending on your energy
and the size of operation. For a
large operation with lost of manure to handle a front end loader would be in
order to turn the piles. For the
two pet donkeys in the back yard covering your manure pile would doe the trick.
Good advise on composting can be had by contacting your local county
agent.
If
raw manure is spread on fields you are setting up the perfect conditions for a
fly population explosion. This is
not appreciated by suburban neighbors of farm operations. Before manure is spread on fields with suburban neighbors it
should be treated or plowed in deeply.
I
can't eliminate very fly breeding site since flies will even breed in damp soil
so I also release fly parasites. These
are teeny tiny nocturnal wasps (no stingers) that lay their eggs in the
developing pupal stage of the fly destroying them before they hatch.
These parasites will be the most beneficial if you start your release
program in the spring. Many companies are now selling beneficial parasites.
I try to deal directly with the inscetory if I can, they will need to
know your acreage and the number of animals you keep.
They will ship you the number of wasps you need on a biweekly basis.
The Penn. Sate study also released these parasites in large poultry
houses and had a dramatic reduction in flies.
Here
at Gate Farm we're a little obsessive compulsive about flies so we also use
sticky tapes, buy them by the hundreds from Jeffers Vet supply, hang them up
horizontally instead of vertically, less likely to end up in ones hair.
The manufacturer say they will trap 10,000 flies I found they trapped a
lot of dust and lost their sticky long before they were full of flies.
If
you have a building that just plain draws flies and would like to get a little
obsessive compulsive too, a commercial fly zapper is a wonderful thing.
My country store was one of those building, next to the petting zoo and
bright and sunny all day. It was a real fly magnet, by evening there would be thousands
of flies cling to the rafters and ceiling so I put a commercial fly zapper in
there. It didn't do much during the
day but come evening all the flies would fly to the light and commit suicides by
the thousands. After a week of this
we only had an occasional fly in the store easily eliminated with the good ole
fashioned fly swatter.
The
only chemicals we use here at Gate Farm are a roll on repellant by Farnam and
Avon Skin-So-Soft bath oil. The
roll-on is great, totally non-threatening to my donkey darlings who think spray
bottles eat donkeys, I apply it around eyes and inside ears daily during fly
season. It has a residual effect
and works so well that there are never any flies on their faces or ears.
The Avon skin so soft I put on their legs putting anything on their
bodies is a waste since they just go and have a big dust bath to get it off.
This program keeps them very comfortable; just remember to clean out your
donkey's ears now and again.
Well
I've saved the best, most gratifying, and my personal very favorite fly control
method for last. THE FLY TRAP, but
not just any flytrap, we're talking the BIG STINKY FLY TRAP!
I have tried every trap on the market, all of them came with a lure that
just did not work, and if you have tried these traps and were not satisfied I
urge you to try the Big Stinky Fly Trap. This
trap is baited with a piece of lean meat or fish and liquid.
I use chicken one wing or drumstick per trap; this baiting method will
work in all similar traps. Like any
thing organic the traps need some simple maintenance, keep the liquid level up,
if they dry out they stop working, and shake it up every other day.
Don't shake ' till your ready to leave the area, it is not called a big
stinky nor nothing!! One
really great feature of this trap is that you can add liquid without taking the
lid off. The penn. State study also
tried flytraps with great success, using 55-gallon drums and 5 gallon buckets!!
I have some 2-gallon traps that become maggot hotels long before they are filled
to capacity. I keep out 12 to 20
traps around the farm and average 8 to 10 gallons of flies a week!
These traps are most gratifying, you can see the flies get trapped, you
see the flies build up, you see the flies ignore your picnic to get to a trap,
and you see the trap needs emptied. Well
everything has a down side, these things really do smell, emptying them is not
for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.
After you have your flies under control, you might find your attracting
all your neighbors, hanging a few traps on your perimeter fence will trap
incoming flies before they get on your farm.
If you only use one fly control method, these traps should be it.
I
did try one other flytrap that I really, really liked. A solar trap, it is a fancy redwood and screen affair with a
bait tray underneath. The flies get
trapped in a screen box on the top where they die and dry out.
When its full you open the hatch and shake their little desiderated
bodies out. It didn't work too well
around here because very time it rained it flooded the bait try, but in a more
arid part of the country this trap would be the way to go.
By
now your thinking---GEE---she really is obsessive compulsive, and your right but
there are very few flies here. NO visitor has ever noticed the absence of flies
until they spy a trap full of fly puree and realize they have been touring the
farm in their shorts and haven't had a fly on them! So give some of these methods a try and just say no to
flies!!
From
the other side of the mountains,
Leslie