Story and photos by Lindsay Humphrey
With three categories of fly control — physical, chemical, and biological — you have quite a few options to reduce the existing fly population while controlling future generations of flies. Of course, combining multiple methods of fly control will be most effective even if you don’t have horses on your property.
Houseflies and common green bottle flies are found in large numbers in Oklahoma. Logically, the first step for controlling flies is to reduce the number buzzing around. A dead fly can’t lay more eggs to hatch.
A female housefly can lay as many as 150 eggs per batch and can do so multiple times during a few days. Within 24 hours, those eggs hatch and begin to grow, and they become full-fledged adult flies in only a week. That rapid-fire life cycle is necessary because a fly lives for only two to four weeks, depending on living conditions.
Even though flies don’t hang around for a long time, they are certainly a nuisance that is worth eliminating. They are attracted primarily to people, places, and animals through their sense of smell.
Physical Fly Control
Sticky traps of various sizes and shapes can hang in areas where flies typically congregate. Although the traps are unsightly, the adhesive on traps is nontoxic to humans and pets. That means traps are safe to use inside the house and outside at the barn. Taking it one step farther, sticky traps can be wrapped around any size barrel and placed in locations where flies might congregate in higher populations.
Of course, removing the carcass-covered sticky tape is far from glamorous, but it certainly gets the job done. A second option is a disposable fly trap filled with a liquid that attracts insects through a small opening in the bag. Either flies can’t navigate their way back through the opening or their wings get wet, and they can’t fly. Either way, the disposal process is just a little bit easier than for sticky tape. Similar to the tape, most liquids used to attract flies are nontoxic to people and pets.
If you do own horses, physically repelling flies can be achieved by using fly sheets, boots, and masks. It’s a method that dates back to a time when horses were used out in the fields for planting and harvesting crops. Luckily, fly-sheet technology has evolved to be much more effective now.
Chemical Fly Control
Likely the most common method of controlling pests is by using fly spray. Exploiting flies’ sense of smell, fly spray covers up the attractive odors of animals while also repelling and sometimes killing insects when they ingest the spray.
One smell that flies don’t like specifically is peppermint. Using essential oils is a simple way to make your own fly spray at home or enhance your favorite brand by using only a few drops at a time. Other oils used to repel insects include lavender, tea tree, and eucalyptus.
Much like a scent diffuser in your home, the same mode of action can be applied to your barn. Just like fly spray,
aerosol fly repellant spews out a scent that flies don’t like. The goal is to keep flies away from the area by covering up the scents that attract them in the first place.
Biological Fly Control
When the goal is to keep flies off your equine partner, sometimes it’s best to work from the inside out. Usually added to horses’ grain ration, a feed-through fly-control pellet is passed through the digestive system and expelled with manure. Active ingredients left over in the manure prevent fly larvae from developing into adulthood, thus effectively reducing your fly population over time.
A similar form of biological warfare on flies is the use of natural-born enemies of the insect. One such enemy is a fly predator from Spalding Labs. Just as fly predators are hatching from their own eggs, horse owners sprinkle them on manure piles where they will kill flies before they hatch.
Because flies use manure as a source of food and a breeding ground, keeping your horse pens and stalls clean and dry will be an effective means of fly control in the long run. And if all else fails, pest-control experts and your local agricultural extension office have ample information and experience at your disposal.
