Flies ... are others around the country suffering an excess of flies this year?

Weird, they've been really bad this side of the Pond this year, too. I've hardly seen any bees or wasps (and no nests to deal with), but flies (mozzies in particular) are all over the place.

Maybe it's the first signs of the 2012 apocalypse? (Err, I mean, olympics)

normal to

particularly

year, you

Not personally noticed any increase this year. We have one of those high voltage / uv zappers in both the farm kitchen and the room I use for meat production, and they both need regular emptying - highly effective and they don't smell (*) unlike flysprays.

AWEM

(*) unless a particularly large moth gets stuck and burns a bit !

In message , Andrew Mawson writes

Has anyone noticed that bumblebees smell like roast chestnuts? Had one burn on a halogen uplighter once.

We have wooden floors and no flies. I think they might hide their eggs in the carpet .. or something. Also do not get the horrid and beastly spiders.

Oddly enough, I was thinking just this morning that there a far fewer flies than normal here. They must have all come your way!

SteveW

In our case it's not an excess of flies we're suffering from but instead have been inundated with thunderbugs this year.

No, hardly any flies - but lots and lots of earwigs.

And so many giant slugs it looks like a dairy farm out on the lawn of an evening. (That is, the giant slugs look a bit like cows grazing...)

I was thinking that there doesn't seem to be as many as normal either. But then the weather has been decidedly cool for summer, overnight is down to or below 10C and day time really strugles to get to 20C. Roughly 5C cooler than normal.

I too have suspended wooden floors, and the only places in the whole house that have carpet, are the bedrooms upstairs. All of the downstairs floors, including the conservatory which also has a suspended wood sub floor, are clad with laminate. I really don't know where they are all coming from. Three or four years back, we had an issue in the village, with an egg farm about a mile away. Apparently, they weren't cleaning out the sheds properly, or were leaving what they had cleaned out, including dead chickens, in piles on the land. That year, there was an absolute infestation of flies for about a month, until the council closed them down and removed the cause. I'm not aware of any such circumstance this year though, so it's a bit of a mystery ...

Arfa

Hmmm. Must be the global warming .... :-)

Arfa

The enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Absolutely. Seems to be a signifcant increase here too (although possibly not statistically significant!) We put it down to the fact that the bin collection has changed and people end up leaving food in the green bins for longer!?!

Last year I bought The Executioner electronic fly swatter and it is really good ONCE you actually contact the fly! The difficulty is following the fly around the room, trying to anticipate where it's going next. What is needed is a laser that detects the fly's movements in a nanosecond or so, and then fires a bolt of 10,000 volts at the thing.

Fly zappers with UV lamps as used in food shops are fairly effective.

Admittedly, you don't get the exercise of chasing the little perishers round with a fly swatter....

What has that got to do with the horrid and beastly spiders, Gib Bogle?

Dunno how long flies eggs take to hatch.

What is horrid and beastly about spiders?

They are sneaky cunning creatures that did not come from our world. They are man's oldest nightmare and I will kill anything with more than four legs. It's not looking too good for the dog at the moment.

No artillery? No choppers? These klods just armed with sten guns? No RPGs, no mortars, no flamethrowers, no tanks?

Nothing like the book, BTW.