Yesterday when the boys were trying to sleep, a lone fly about the size of a C-130 buzzed around the bedroom keeping them from dozing off much longer than it normally would take. It was so big it sent our 3 year old screaming from the room after he woke up! I attacked it with a magazine to show Sam how to take care of them, but it put him on the run for awhile. Controlling flies can be a lesson in insanity.

I love summer, but the flies make me crazy. We’re in and out of the house so much it’s truly like a revolving door that unwanted visitors usually find their way inside. Once and awhile it’s a honey bee, but more often than not, flies are the biggest intruder.

Controlling Flies with Parasitic Wasps

Since we live in an area with neighbors who have chickens, sheep, goats, horses and cows in the backyard, I’ve had several people ask me how well the fly parasites work, particularly when you do have livestock that brings them in.

There are parasitic wasps (Spalangia and Muscidifurax) that do an excellent job of keeping filth fly populations (the ones you have in the barn and often in the house) under control. The tiny adult wasps, which are typically nocturnal, search out fly pupae in manure or compost piles, and will actually burrow up to six inches below the surface to locate the pupae. They lay their eggs in the pupae and voila! I’ve read reports of over a 90% kill rate. That’s pretty good.

You can order parasitic wasps from a number of mail order catalogs, and they send the wasps while they’re still growing inside of the fly pupae. When it arrives, simply dig a shallow trench around the manure pile or compost heap, sprinkle in the pupae/wasp larvae and cover it with an inch of soil or manure. Ive done it in the pasture, and simply went through the field adding a bit to the horse piles without covering them.

Natural Solutions

Or you can put them in a screened bag with large enough holes for the wasps to escape. Hang them near the house or where you keep your animals to help knock out the population. Its also important to do several applications 2 to 3 weeks apart, particularly during the first year, to exponentially decrease their numbers.

Other than that, your best bet is to keep the house shut up as much as possible. The sticky fly traps can catch a few some, too, although they look awful. There are also better looking traps that dont display the gruesome catch on a strip of gear that has a removable glue board and pheromones to draw them into it.

Smacking them with a good old fashioned fly swatter gives you the most satisfaction with immediate results. Or, if you like a little more flash and action opt for the electronic fly swatter. Its like a charged badminton racket powered by a couple of AA batteries. I just might have to buy one for Sam so he can overcome his fear of flies.