A tip: dealing with flies

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Arks

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Discovered an interesting thing today. One of my vacation rental apartments (the one where the innkeeper road trip crew stayed) has no means of ventilation, no windows that open (I'm working to remedy that), meaning if someone cooks with garlic and onions, the only way to air the place out is to crack the front door open and turn on the vent hood over the kitchen range, and the vents in the bathroom.
So anyway, flipping the apartment today with kitchen odors to deal with, I opened the door a crack, went about my work, and eventually had a dozen flies in the place.
Luckily they all gathered in the windows, looking for a way to escape the cooking odors, no doubt.
I worked on them 15 minutes with a fly swat, with about 30% success. As I was using my Dustbuster hand vacuum to pick up the fly corpses, I said, what the heck, might as well try it, and it worked! 100% success rate by turning on the vacuum and slowly approaching the living flies on the window sills. They didn't fly away as long as I approached slowly, and the thing sucked them up before they could escape! Much easier than the swatter, and cleaner too.
If you try this, just be sure to take the thing out of doors to empty it, because as soon as I opened up the filter, they all flew away! But they had smiles on their faces, getting to spend that time in the filth of the vacuum bag!
 
ewww .... good to know. i use vacuum cleaners on spiders and their webs. BUT get the bag outside and into the trash or if it has no bag, dump it outside in the bin, quick. i remember vacuuming up a web with the little egg sacks or whatever they are (didn't see the spider) and next time i used the vacuum, about a hundred baby spiders were running around inside it. not cute! in spite of charlotte's web.
 
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I would suggest you wear one of these our Aussie Fly hat.
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"Big, dumb flies"....I hope you don't have a case of cluster flies.
I had those once in my house in Ohio. I battled them for about 2 years, including professional exterminators. It reminded me of the Amityville Horror house where they gathered all over the windows and then at night, kept flying into the light fixtures, and bouncing off the wall. Turns out, I had to treat my lawn in the early spring to keep the flies from coming in during the summer.
 
"Big, dumb flies"....I hope you don't have a case of cluster flies.
I had those once in my house in Ohio. I battled them for about 2 years, including professional exterminators. It reminded me of the Amityville Horror house where they gathered all over the windows and then at night, kept flying into the light fixtures, and bouncing off the wall. Turns out, I had to treat my lawn in the early spring to keep the flies from coming in during the summer..
We had cluster flies in our original house. Maddening bonking into walls and windows. They come in to overwinter and can crawl through very narrow cracks even though the fly itself is big. I use a shop vacuum on the old house flies, but finally got around to sealing light fixtures and adding fine mesh screens to the vermin screens on soffit vents. Seems to work
For the B&B construction we made it super tight and it worked.
 
We have cluster fly issues and a company in Canada makes a trap called "cluster buster". They work and last a few years.. They are not toxic.. If you have a cluster fly issue I highly recommend them.. They are worth every penny..
 
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