Invasion of the Fat Flies
Didn’t anyone tell these guys it’s winter? When we got home last night, we were greeted by this clustering of 50 or so giant flies on the inside of our back door, apparently attracted to the nearby light bulb. The only explanation we can come up with is that the unseasonably mild weather we’ve been…
Didn’t anyone tell these guys it’s winter? When we got home last night, we were greeted by this clustering of 50 or so giant flies on the inside of our back door, apparently attracted to the nearby light bulb. The only explanation we can come up with is that the unseasonably mild weather we’ve been having resulted in some premature hatching. Luckily, these guys were as slow as they were big, so it wasn’t too hard to dispatch of them with a rolled-up newspaper. Has anyone else encountered this?
yea i live in MO & have this problem now… My wife thinks there something must be dead in the house or something b.c there tons of them every where……… I kill like 10 one day & by the next there like 50 at there funeral What causes these big ass flies to come out? I notice that they are slow if you have a cold room that there in? I really would like to know what kind of flies these are & whats it mean to have that many? Is there something dead under the house or what?
A few winters back we had a problem with large amounts of big flies on the inside window sill in one of our bedrooms. It turned out that 2 squirrels had frozen to death in the roof/gutter area.
We had exterminators come for the flies, but they wouldn’t go away. They finally disappeared once roofer found the dead squirrels.
If they come back you may want to check for a dead animal.
sorry.
7:19 PM, racism’s not “cutesy”. It’s tired and offensive.
Do you live by a chinese restaurant?
Did someone spray honey at that spot on the glass and muntin? Why are they all hanging out like that in a group?
I used to get them each year in my place upstate. Simply awful. No matter how many died, more came alive! It finally dawned on me to call the exterminator. Apparently you need to kill off the eggs (that are laid in the ground) before they hatch. Otherwise it is wait till next year.
So now, each Tuesday after Labor Day, my new best friend comes and does the deed. Haven’t had a problem since.
This happened to me a few years back. I saw a couple of huge black flys in my apt. I went out for an hour or so and came back to find hundreds of them in the main hallway. It was nasty.
They seemed to be coming from the skylight at the top of the stairs and I assumed maybe a bird had died up there and all the maggots hatched at the same time?
These are almost certainly attic flies, which do not lay eggs in/on carrion. They do tend to show up when the heat comes on for the first time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_fly
Yes, there may be a dead rat or somesuch near the outside of your house but, more likely, you have a dead mouse in the house. It may have smelled for a day or two…and not even that badly and is now desiccated.
The maggots would have done away with most of the flesh and what was left dried up.
Can be hard to find the mouse…if a neighbor put down/had an exterminator put down rat poison or somesuch recently, mice eating it may have left that building searching for water. The current rodenticides often make the rodent very thirsty (so they presumably search for water, leave the structure and die outside). When you have an old brick party wall from the 1800s, mice can make it through from one house to another.
They can die in all sorts of lovely places including wedged in layers of stacked, folded clothes. This happened to us a couple of years ago. Smelled something odd for a day or two walking by a room we barely go in. It was more of sickly sweet but feted smell that disappeared after a couple of days when we started having flies piling up on the windows in that room. I went searching for what I supposed at that point was a dead mouse and found it. Not pretty but not smelly at that point.
We also experienced the dead rat scenario this fall…somehow a couple of the fat flies came into the house, maybe when the doors were open. When I discovered the rat outside (wedged into a tight spot), there were many flies on and many maggots it…it wasn’t fun…and SMELLED. Ugh. But disposed of. Flies disappeared immediately of course.
FG/TGL