Flies!

Oooh er!

Yes to 2 of those questions, I have recently bought some plants (cacti & succulents) and we have open fields behind us, although there are no cattle in at the moment.

Bear them, I meant.

The most horrendous things are may bugs. Quite amazing things but I can't hear them. The zoom round the room bumping into things and making a horrible sound. They don't live long and then you have to get rid of their bodies. Very strange insects.

lemongrove For the first time ever, I've got what I think must be compost flies. Very small and insubstantial, but very irritating! Do you have a way to get rid of them please?

Compost flies?
They often come with bought house plants.

Do you live near fields? Cluster fly grubs germinate in dung. Oh joy, oh rapture!

Every year when it becomes warm enough to open the conservatory French doors, we start with the fly problem.

Having tried various fly screens, we have found that the net ones with magnets on the bottom are the easiest to use (although the grandchildren aren’t very good at closing them). We just have to remember to put them up at the beginning of spring.

Horse flies from the nearby paddock are the worst!

When we had work done on our roof some years ago, we were invaded by thousands and thousands of flies from the roofspace. We sprayed them with some sort of fly killer, then spent the evening listening to them buzzing round slower and slower, until they dropped down dead! We then had to sweep up the piles of dead flies. Just horrible.

I had loads of these horrid little flies, traced them to the compost I had used to repot my spider plants.

The smaller flies seem to like breeding in a flat roof space - do you have a flat roof?

The mozzies/gnats are certainly around in profusion and have already bitten me several times - what a good start to the season.

The flies could be fruit flies or cluster flies which have found somewhere nice to lay eggs which are now hatching out. Do you have a compost heap nearby as they could have emerged from there?

We had flying ants en masse in the conservatory last year - hanging down in great clusters when we got home.

My first thought was Fruit Flies, but not sure now. We did have an infestation of flies, just after DS2 was born, and just in his room, but that lasted only for a week or so. We also get the odd, big wasp thing, usually on the landing. I think they come down from the loft, but wonder how on earth they squeeze through the minute gaps around the loft hatch. Shape shifters?

We're also on the flight path for the local bee population! I've lost count of the number or bees that I've rescued from the conservatory windows! When I release them they seem to head off in a direction that's completely unrelated to where our house is!

Also, we have a cat, who is always looking for playmates and is completely indiscriminate in her choices, so I'm terrified of her getting stung, especially in her mouth.

phoenix You haven't recently installed any house plants, have you? That's how our mini-flies sneaked in! Only a very few, but seeing one in the loo bowl turned me into an instant fly murderer If they're the same flies as yours, they seem to breed rather well - and quickly - so I adopted the Be Ruthless Strategy and killed them rather than live and let live. I hate killing anything, but the loo bowl incident had a profound effect on my attitude!

We had the 'wasp' thing happening in our porch turnrd out there was a huge wasp nest in the porch roof. As for flies I have my French doors open with one of those magnetic fly screens up it stops the buggars.

Sorry, can't help you Phoenix, but I'd love to know where the wasps that appear in my tiny shower room come from. Every year, big fat solitary wasps appear from nowhere at the rate of about one a week for a couple of months.

Probably cluster flies - we had a conservatory full of them at our old house. OH used to hoover them up; but we would come back half an hour later and there were another equally large batch of them. I think we enlisted the aid of the council in the end.

They were revolting! - the flies mean

Just after posting that the adverts on the bottom of the screen changed to removal van offers!

We're in a 4th floor flat but somehow, if the windows are open we're inundated with flies, bluebottle and smaller ones too. Don't understand why they should be drawn to our open windows. Neighbours on higher floors have real problems with this. We must be an unusually smelly block!

Flies!! The mere thought sends us both into quite a rampage!!Filthy things!
Normally we are placid enough, but my OH who mans the kitchen these days, truly will not let one enter without being on its tail right away!
Living next door to a working farm, we dare not open up our conservatory`s French doors or even windows......... having found the place inundated with the foul “things”...... though in our case these are flies.
Having a Conservatory not fit for purpose is pointless, and though he would go on a daily rampage, hoovering around, it just still was a nuisance .............until he called in at our nearby Agricultural Store whereupon he purchased a tiny canister .....similar to a candle with a wick that you light....and providing you close all windows and remove all house plants it works well............so sorry but we do not have the name.
This worked beautifully and we have had little bother since either,though I suspect with this heat arriving,like yourself, we shall all suffer with these various pests.

Thanks for the responses.

We only have a loft, the loft hatch is on the landing ceiling but these are quite definitely NOT houseflies, they are much smaller than that.

I have quite a sensitive "nose" and usually detect unpleasant whiffs at 50 paces, but haven't noticed anything ponging!

Do you have an attic phoenix, are they on the same ceiling as the attic door?

We converted the attic into two rooms and since then I have to hoover up dead house flies whenever I go up there (I don't go into those rooms very often . I think they are breeding in the roof space and coming through the access panels.

We have had this twice over 50+ years. (I mention this so as not to be accused of having a clarty house

1st outbreak traced to soup pot, in which I had boiled a chicken carcass intending to make soup, put in the back of a big cupboard while tidying kitchen and forgot about it for months.

2nd was traced to a dead pigeon in the loft. How it got in there remains a mystery.