Way too many flies, what can I do?

[gixxerific]

Just learned a trick from a Filipino friends mom; we were eating and the flies swarmed the table. She came out with two ziploc bags filled with water, plopped them on the table, and voila! the flies vanished. Mom says it's feng shui; I don't care if it's The Force, I have seen it work and how! I am assured this works every time...

My suspicion is that water draws dragonflies, so once flies see water they scoot before the dragonflies show, but I am just guessing. Try this, you will be amazed...

HG

Great idea, I remember, now, hearing about this before. The story I read was from a RV'r (camping). I believe what he suggested was to hang a 'clear bottle' of water next to where you want them repelled. Again if I remember right the bottle\ziplock bag of water would confuse the vision of the flies by the reflections.

I'll see if I can find something about this, it was a several years ago.

And we have tons of dragonflies around here, the size of jumbo jets.

Did a quick search and came up with this, thanks for reminding me HG

(Quote) "Okay guys, I have the low down on this....I have family all over Mexico and travel down there quite a bit. This myth is REAL!! Lots of people in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America hang small plastic bags from doorways to repel flies. The myth says that as flies approach the entrance and they look at the bag of water their vision becomes incredibly scrambled and drives them crazy! Remember that according to science flies have several eyes or some sort of kaleidoscope like vision. Apparently the water in the bag mirrors their image many times over and drives them insane."

here is another slightly different explanation but still confirms that this works. https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/07/repel-flies-with-a-bag-of-water/

[Diane]

Down south when I to restaurants I would see bottles of water on the outside tables and asked what they were for. It was to repel flies. We weren't bothered by any, so it worked. I also heard of the bag of water in the doorway to stop them from coming in.

[Pippin Limbertwig]

We have cows, goats and seven dogs. We used to feel like we were in a horror movie named "Invasion of the Flies". We release fly predators (ours come from Spaulding-Labs) every three weeks during the warm months. The cows still have some horn-and-face-flies and a few horse flies but we seldom see stable or house flies.

We also use glass wasp traps baited with sugar beside the hummingbird feeders, and with meat scraps for yellow jackets late in the season and blow flies when ever they are around. I think blow flies are the reason people used to believe in spontaneous generation - we won't see any for a year- but if there is a dead animal they show up within hours.

I keep a small glass trap on the kitchen counter baited with watery tomato juice for the fungus gnats (fruit flies).

When we had horses we added vinegar to their feed - about an ounce per day - to lessen their attractiveness to the flies.

I had forgotten the plastic bags of water - we used to hang them from the ceiling and said it calmed the flies. Hey - would a disco-ball work? CD's?

I have heard that in the southeast the reason people painted their porch ceilings yellow had something to do with flies - I assume to repel them - maybe to hide the fly specks, since yellow attracts most insects....

I had forgotten how hard we used to struggle to avoid the flies.