We appear to be having hot Summer months in Britain. We are not accustomed to this. We have been in t-shirts minus the fleeces for, oooh, must be at least a month. The doors are flung wide open to let in what fresh air remains.
And with that fresh air comes a host of little visitors. They are always with us, the flies, but this summer the moist humidity is going to their binary little heads. Bacteria rule, and the fly is feasting on a scale not experienced since 2003. Before their great-great-great grandfathers were a twinkle in their forefathers’ simple eyes.
The humans view the fly explosion with dismay. For many, respect for all life comes second to respect for the roast chicken cooling on the sideboard, waiting to feed eight.
The least environmentally aware have a simple solution: fly spray. It really works. One gust of this stuff and the flies are toast. (Ugh).
But it makes nearby food taste most strange, and one always has those abortive attempts which leave white circles of fly spray in about eight different places on the window. After that, one faces the removal of said fly. Our Dyson has obliged on several occasions and I steadfastly refuse to empty it.
One can also pursue them round the kitchen with one of those ridiculous fly swatters, a copy of Vogue or a Jamie Oliver cookery book: the tool is immaterial. It just has to be flat and forceful. This is the comedy Keystone Cops option. It’s a great spectator sport, and eventually effective. But who cleans the windows afterwards?
I won’t even discuss the rails of plastic strips hung on doors to keep the intrepid musca domestica out in the first place. The best that can be said of them is that they are Technicolor. I have a horrible feeling they actually work. My mother is testing one right now. I’ll keep you posted.
No: my son hit on the perfect environmentally friendly way to dispose of flies in the kitchen: the Venus Fly Trap.
These little nightmares from the plant world are coveted by little boys. They look like a green, stationary, small tyrannosaurus rex. If you’ve never seen one, its time for a trip to the garden centre. Because to really appreciate them, you have to see what they can do.
They smell great to flies. They are the fly equivalent of hot baking bread, or maybe an indian takeaway. Once the visitors arrive to partake, the plants have a reflex action. One tummy brush from a fly and those dinosaur jaws clamp tight shut, locking the flies in.
And here’s the thing- it really works. Flies make a beeline- or perhaps a flyline- for the VFT, flies fly into the jaws, jaws snap shut. Job done.
Into every jar of ointment a little bug must crawl. And so it is with this perfect, if grisly, solution to our problems.
The textbooks say: the Venus Flytrap secretes a solution which dissolves its food and within a short while, the fly has miraculously disappeared.
Well, ours must have indigestion. Because three weeks after the first fly met its maker, the remains are still there. The jaws are still shut. I have considered using my tweezers to relieve the VFT of its gruesome fare, but I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s just a big fly graveyard on my kitchen windowsill.
And, more dismaying, my son is becoming more and more deeply attached to this little monster. Read Day of the Triffids? It is sitting, in microcosm, by my kitchen window.
Just don’t look at any bright asteroids, boys. You never know what might happen.
Kate Shrewsday 
You could always try my grandad’s solution – he used to cut wasps in half on the wing, with a breadknife. It would probably work with flies, but you might have to be a bit quicker.
I never really fancied the toast at my nan’s house….
Now that’s a transferrable skill if ever I heard one Jan! I’m off to practise my knife throwing….
Great pic Kate! I almost totally bought into the VFT method until you mentioned that the remains were still there 3weeks later!
but it’s hot there? i am so envious!
Well, meli, with typical British reserve I would have to say its warmer than it has been for some time 🙂 We’re around the 23-25 degree celcius mark, which is enough to enliven the flies anyway….
There’s always fly paper! Talk about YUK! The bodies just stay there, stuck – many live for some time, helplesssly glued, yet trying to get away. Same for little “fly traps,” a long sticky strip that you hang by a window, that has some sort of attractant to which they are drawn, and then get irrevocably stuck!
So glad you are reposting! Thanks!
One of the few pluses about sitting here in minus-temperatures with a broken boiler is the merciful absence of flies, Paula. Thanks for the suggestion to repost.
Slipping in a new one tomorrow I think. Had to promise to do it to bribe someone. I have no principles whatsoever.
Principles, schminciples! You go, girl! 😀
Winter is nice for solving buggy problems, but it does nothing for mice – who are always looking for a nice warm place to come to and entertain our cat.! I get so amused at our cat Justin, who absolutely LOVES playing with them. When he has finally managed to exhaust it to death (or nearly so), and it has become a lifeless little lump, he brings it to us, cries piteously, and says, “Fix it! It won’t play anymore!” Since the little things look like they jumped off a page drawn by Beatrix Potter, we usually try and rescue them and then banish them outside. I don’t know if we are doing them any favors. I mean, is it better to die by cat or exposure?
Justin ha become quite adept at keeping the little thing to himself, and selfishly keeping it away from our dog Princess. But it’s a shame, because I think what she would like to do is play a game of soccer with Justin – the mouse being the ball.
We do have one buggy problem in the fall/winter: Lady Beetles. These are the Asian version of ladybugs, and they are the same size and shape as ladybugs, but orange with brown dots. They have become a pesky problem, because the population is rapidly increasing, and covering an ever-expanding potrion of the country. They come in the house through tiny cracks, and they settle by the hundreds, all clumped together up alomg the ceilings inside the house and in the corners. When they die, they have a terrible smell, and when still alive, and not clumping in huge numbers around the house, they fly around in the lights and lamps like moths, and they make an annoying racket hitting the lightbulbs and bouncing off the inside of the lampshades. These beetles were originally imported to try and control the wooly adelgid problem that has been wiping out the hemlock trees in our forests. The beetles are basically harmless, but they are very annoying. We generally just suck them up in the vacuum cleaner and dump them into a closed bag and put it in the trash.
I’ll stop now – I’m sure you’ve had enough!
I can so imagine how your son would love the Venus Flytrap! Is it still thriving? (The VFT, not your son! :-))
When we arrived in London, in the autumn, we immediately noticed the absence of flies and other flying insects, so common in SA. But with last year’s hot summer, as you describe, the flies made their presence known. Along with the midges… fun! Not.
Sunshine xx
I feel we may have some way to go to match the many varieties of creepy crawly that grace your fair homeland, Sunshine. The VFT is alive but far from well. It does not like winter on its windowsill. It is dreaming weakly of rainforests stuffed with inexhaustible supplies of flies of alarming provenance. I hope the Spring cheers it up, I am beginning to feel quite inhumane.
Those pesty little flies.
We still have several feet of snow on the ground and icy temperatures, so, we have awhile before we need to employ a fly-trap. Your post brings to mind the movie “Little House of Horrors”. “Feed me, Seymour” says the fly trap.
Do you know, Penny, I have never been able to bring myself to watch it. I can take any measure of ghostliness, but that unsettling storytelling tradition represented by LSOH usually sends me out of the sitting room for the duration…seeing as how you’ve mentioned it though, Penny, I may have to have another try at watching it. It is such a yawning gap in my education 😀
I love this post! Great writing, science and good humor in one fell swoop.
I’m glad the VFT is (somewhat) working for you. My very tidy sister-in-law was plagued with flies this summer–her first season on her family’s new farm. The constant buzzing drove her crazy. Maybe I’ll track down a VFT and present it as a gift on our next visit.
Enjoy the London weather!
Maura
Maura, I would if it were here, and I look forward to its return, but regrettfully this is a repost from sunnier days. We are sitting here with abroken boiler and minus-temperatures. Grim.
What a beautiful blog you have there! Truly, it was like coming home and kicking off one’s shoes to visit.
So . . . how did you do it? Repost and keep the comments intact? Is it a skill that techno-phobes could learn?
Loved this post ~ the environmentally friendly solution to pesky pests. But you may need a few more VFTs to conquer the hoards:
http://nrhatch.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/fun-with-words-venus-fly-trap/
Cheers!
Nancy, thanks for all that techno-help! I just changed the date on the post at the edit stage and it transferred complete with comments. Lost its old slot, but hey, you win some , you lose some.
Love than animation of yours, and have learnt something which may life the depression which has settled on our little plant: one can simply buy flies. Who would have thought it. Right now, it is the most grisly piece of VFT-love I can conceive of and will therefore delegate it to my nearest and dearest. But it’s a tip in a million, thanks, Nancy.
They also eat little fly-sized bits of raw hamburger – which is what my brothers used to feed their VFT when there were no flies available.
Useful, useful….a little unsettling, but very useful…..
Cool! How easy is that? New date. New spot.
I am pretty sure that pet stores sell flies for iguanas, frogs, etc. But I didn’t actually call to check before tossing that into the story.
Good luck keeping your pet plant alive.
Molasses, Kate, molasses is the answer to flies:
http://theonlycin.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/enforced-sobriety-and-molasses/
Cindy, Dante would be proud of you. The moment the little critters show their exoskeletal faces I’m there with a bowl. The flytrap will turn a more emerald shade of green with envy.
I was just baffled about the weather we’re having in Britain til I saw in one of your comments that is a repost from the summer! You got me worried, there! It’s bloody cold in Wales at the moment and we’re currently having a boiler transplant…
We got two insectivorous plants – pitcher plants – a couple of years ago and they worked really well, so we put them in the kitchen. Then they started getting tired and going brown. They now reside on the upper landing windowsills and are doing nothing much at all except looking brown and wilty (actually, they’re pretty moribund).
I was never lucky with Venus Flytraps, they’re too temperamental. By the way, a tip – these plants don’t like tap water because of the chemicals that are added to it, and they don’t like fertiliser.
Our boiler is broken too and we’re shivering away 🙂 I’ve never tried pitcher plants, Val – maybe this year we will have a summer which is worthy of the term and I can try one out…
I have just begun to repost after 200 daily posts (https://kateshrewsday.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/engulf) – the family were losing out while I peered endlessly at the laptop. Missing it more than I can say, though, and I daresay more will be in the pipeline before long.
Oh, that’s a shame for us! But I understand as I also have a cyberhabit. Thankfully, I don’t have children or they would be starving by now and would still be wearing clothing from their infant days (and if they were infants they would be garbed in…. in…. I dunno, I’ll have to think about that one.
You do know, don’t you, that once cyberspace has caught you it actually never lets you go? I’ve tried numberous times to do what you’re doing… I even wrote a post called… called… er… what was it called? I’ll just pop over and have a look. Ah yes, a post called “Life Is Not A Blog Post” which pretty much sums things up in its title (but is well worth a look cos there are nice pics there too!). As you can see, I wrote it in October and it’s now.. ahem… February.
So… well… I think I must now do another post based on ‘Engulf’ Thank you very much. I think.
😉
The way flies are, here, this summer, I fear that your little friend would grow like Seymour from ‘Little Shop’ and graduate to ingesting the entire household.