A couple days ago, we saw a fly in the family room. It’s February, and cold out, so that seemed odd, but my husband zapped it. Problem solved, right? That very night, we saw another one. Since then, we’ve had to kill several flies in the house, but we have no idea where they’re coming from.
This happened once before — actually, it was a lot worse, with dozens of flies rather than just one at a time. It was about a year ago, and we traced the flies to our countertop compost crock. We usually dump it each week at the farmer’s market, but we’d missed the farmer’s market twice, and apparently three weeks was enough time for flies to breed in there. Once we figured that out and dumped the stuff, we were able to obliterate the flies one by one, until we had a fly-free house.
That’s when we bought the bug zappers. These look like small plastic tennis rackets filled with electrified metal mesh. You hit the fly with them, and it gets a jolt of electricity. Sometimes it takes two jolts. The fly zappers work, but they’re reactive. Until we can figure out where the flies are coming from, the zappers are damage control, but I want to prevent the flies from being here in the first place.
So where are they coming from? When they first appeared this week, the compost had been recently dumped and the crock was empty. As far as we know, no food has been left out, and no dead animals are rotting in a crawlspace.
I am really getting sick of this.
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