Nothing is Smarter than a Winter Housefly

We live in dairy country so in the summer there is an adequate supply of houseflies. A few ounces of cow manure can support hundreds of fly larva. My son, who is a veterinarian here, always gives a horde of flies a free ride in his pickup from some dairy farm to his home. My grandkids are experts at swatting flies.

Houseflies know all about winter and they are against it. In the fall, they try to get into my house for safety from the frigid cold. When they get in, they hide under my desk or table or high on the ceiling, hoping not to get smacked by a fly swatter or a rolled up newspaper.

By Thanksgiving Day most houseflies have gone to the great beyond. Some haven’t. These are the last pesky half-dozen that we just can’t get. Finally, we get four out of the six and we think we have got them all. But by Christmas there is still one the size of a boxcar flying around and driving us bonkers. Finally he is gone having died from old age or we got lucky with our copy of Farm Journal.

January was peaceful. No flies! Then last night (in February), when I was on my way to bed, a fly showed up in my bathroom. He probably had been sleeping in some corner or nook and now he was hungry. He buzzed me while I looked for someway to get him. Then I saw him hiding on the ceiling. He was gone when I came back from my wife’s bathroom with a can of her hair spray. No hairspray for him.

With the fly like last night, I locked him in the bathroom thinking that I would get him this morning or at least by the end of March. There was neither hide nor hair of him this morning. I know that he is lurking somewhere.

Next to whales, porpoises, and parrots, flies are the smartest critters on the planet. What chance has a human got against a fly? (To get on my smart list a critter must not have been engaged in war for the last ten days.)

You can read about flies at http://www.ivyhall.district96.k12.il.us/4th/kkhp/1insects/fly.html. Don’t read this just before dinnertime. (For those in Utah or Idaho, don’t read this just before suppertime.) The referenced article does not tell you about the most important part of the fly although it does show you everything in a highly-magnified image. That is the eye.

There is a great image of the eye of a housefly at http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/techniques/phasegallery/flyeye.html. You will want to look at that beauty. However, there is no text explaining the image other than how it was obtained.

The California Institute of Technology has developed a “new tool that may help them unravel the secrets of a fly's agility: an analog electronic circuit that models a key part of the fly's visual system and is built into a rudimentary robot so that it can interact with the real world, which was developed at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. The developers of the robot fly say it may turn out to be a better probe of the fly visual system than experiments with live flies or computer simulations. The robot fly's eye may also benefit robotics, because its analog design is fast, very stable, and uses little power.” This little gem was taken from http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/285/5433/1472a. Only the first paragraph of the article was there, so I didn’t get the meat of the thing.

The fly has a compound eye. You will definitely want to go to http://www.the-piedpiper.co.uk/th6.htm to see how the eye works. The bottom line is that you can not creep up on a fly. He literally has eyes that see in every direction. While you can see only one of him, he can see a zillion of you.

This now leads to our strategy for getting that last winter fly before he dies of old age. We fly fighters don’t consider the fly dying of old age as sport. Here are my suggestions for getting rid of that smart winter fly:

1. Go down to the surplus store or get on the Internet and get yourself a pair of night vision goggles. Mr. Fly knows you can’t see in the dark. You might be able to creep up on him. At http://www.opticsplus.net/ they have a nice set for only $3545.00. You’ll have to hurry. They are going fast.

2. By a paintball gun. It may not kill him but it will blind him when the paint covers his eyes. I suggest the BT Combat Kit for only $144.99 at http://www.paintball-discounters.com/?gclid=CLOvm671hoMCFUNwLAodlxjtjw. It’s a dandy. With night vision optics you will kill ’em dead.

3. House flies have natural enemies. Read a great exposé at http://creatures.ifas.ufl.edu/urban/flies/house_fly.htm. I like the wasp method. That’s why we have wasps on our back porch and one wasp nest in the bird feeder on the front lawn. My wife wants me to get rid of these wasps but I say “Let ’em live!” I tried to knock out a wasp nest when I was a kid. Enough said. (Hell yes, I got stung!) I’m going to let a few more wasps come in the house this summer. When that smart winter fly shows up, we’ll be ready for him (or her).

Well, that aught to get you started.

I think I told you in another article that I’ve had scientific experience with houseflies. If you pin them on a whirligig and let them fly, their body temperature rises 4 Fahrenheit degrees. I learned this when working with Dr. Wayne Rowley at Iowa State University. My contribution was the iron-constantan thermocouples we stuck in their abdomans and the voltmeter we used to determine their temperatures.

This suggests another way to get rid of a pesky fly that is smarter than you. Get him moving and don’t let him stop. He sooner or later will run out of gas and drop to the floor. Then you can step on him (unless he’s behind the toilet where you can’t reach him).

The End