You probably don't want to read any further if you're particularly squeamish, or eating.
Once a fortnight I travel 80 miles to check my late father's house, clear the post, mow the lawn, harvest the rhubarb etc until contracts are exchanged for its sale.
This afternoon I discovered the conservatory (5m x 3m, tiled floor, brick walls to knee height, uPVC DG sides and roof) was full of flies and maggots - thousands and thousands of the things. The floor appears to be carpeted in salt and pepper, but on closer inspection it's writhing... Some of them must have got through the slightly open roof window and the hot weather has helped their numbers explode.
As it was 4.30pm on a Sunday I couldn't do very much about it apart from obtain a can of fly spray from the local convenience store and empty it into the conservatory through a slightly open French door.
What's the solution? Is there a simple way to deal with it, or should I call in a professional? I'm away for work all this week and it's not something that can be left, for the sake of the neighbours if nothing else.
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I believe they need a food source. You probably need to find that and get rid of it.
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As BT says, if there are that many flies/maggots there has to be a food source. I don't think I would leave it until next weekend before sorting it.
At least it's a tiled floor. I hope they can't get out of the room into others.
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What he said.
You may remember a few weeks ago I reported my drive awash with maggots which had appeared from the wheelie bin.
Somewhere has attracted the flys and they have layed their eggs and then hatched.
A good dousing in fly spray should do the trick but you need to try and identify the food source.
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Probably a dead bird or animal of some sort. The maggots will have devoured the carcase and most likely there's not much left, probably a beak and a few bones. Sweep up the maggots and throw them outside - the bird will soon eat them.
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>> Sweep up the maggots and throw them outside - the bird will soon eat them.
But not next Sunday or the Sunday after that.
I would have sprayed and waited for them to 'die a bit' and got them out of the conservatory door I think, Not nice to sort this.
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In a way maggots are quite interesting. Kept in bran they are quite clean to handle I used to buy them for fishing bait.
They have a life cycle of blow fly - eggs - maggots - pupae - blow fly, which in a warm room takes 143 days so forensic specialists can date the age of a corpse quite accurately. Since there are flies as well as maggots present in the conservatory we can say that the creature on which the maggots were feeding died at least a week ago.
If it weren't for maggots we would be knee deep in rotting corpses!
Last edited by: CGNorwich on Mon 14 Jul 14 at 10:06
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iIf it weren't for maggots we would be knee deep in rotting corpses!
As charming thoughts go, this certainly is one.
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But it is undoubtedly true. Decay is part of life.
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>> In a way maggots are quite interesting. Kept in bran they are quite clean to
>> handle I used to buy them for fishing bait.
>>
>> They have a life cycle of blow fly - eggs - maggots - pupae -
>> blow fly, which in a warm room takes 143 days
143 hours!
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>> They have a life cycle of blow fly - eggs - maggots - pupae -
>> blow fly, which in a warm room takes 143 days so forensic specialists can date
>> the age of a corpse quite accurately. Since there are flies as well as maggots
>> present in the conservatory we can say that the creature on which the maggots were
>> feeding died at least a week ago.
>>
>>
>> If it weren't for maggots we would be knee deep in rotting corpses!
If they had a life cycle of 143 days, we would be knee deep in maggots.
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"f they had a life cycle of 143 days, we would be knee deep in maggots."
Don't follow the logic of that - Whether they had a life cycle of 143 days or 143 hours (actual) providing they were maggots for the same proportion of the fly's lifespan and the overall number of flies in any stage of their life cycle was the same then the number of maggots existing at any one time would be exactly the same.
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" then the number of maggots existing at any one time would be exactly the same."
Don't agree with that, either. Take a corpse. Flies land on it. It takes maybe three months to disappear completely, by which point the 143 hour lifecycle means there have been 14 lifecycles of flies, and no doubt the corpse *was* knee deep in them at some point.
If the lifecycle were 143 days, then the rate of population growth would be much, much, slower. And as the population explodes in areas where there is plenty of food (corpses) owing to the rapid lifecycle my conclusion has to be that with a 143 day lifecycle the species probably wouldn't be viable (the corpse having been removed by other processes before the fly's lifecycle had completed a single cycle).
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Let's us assume the environment produces a fixed number of dead animals. These decaying corpses can serve as a food source for a fixed number of maggots. Now the life span of the maggot is irrelevant. The totality of decaying animals can only support a fixed number of maggots in the environment at any one time.
Imagine a filed of cabbages. Say I get 500 cabbages in a field. I then find a new variety that give two crops a year. I get 1000 cabbages a year now but there are still only 500 cabbages around at any one time.
Having said that the rapid life cycle of the fly is undoubtedly an evolutionary adaption to enable it to compete in the struggle to compete for a limited food supply.
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Apparently there is a succession of fly species etc which are attracted to dead (or even living) flesh. The cheese fly waits until around 3 months.... Forensic entomology: on which there is more than enough in Wiki.
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One experience;
I left my house in San Fran unattended for some months and a large mammal, probably some kind of squirrel, fell down the chimney and got trapped - probably just shortly before I got back. When I returned the house was a seething mass of flies and maggots. utterly skin-crawlingly disgusting.
I didn't have time to resolve it there and then so just shut the door and went off on business for two weeks. When I got back everything had died and dried. It was a big vacuuming job, but not worse than that.
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Hoover them up and burn the bag.
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We once had flying ants emerging into our bedroom through a tiny crack under the window sill in astonishing numbers. Fortunately they were all very dozy so we hoovered them up and puffed ant killer into the crack. Still took a while to stop them.
Long time ago, I had a contact who had a maggot farm between Todmorden and Bacup IIRC. Quite lucrative I think. He sent a refrigerated lorry over to Germany I believe, and probably other European countries every week or so, full of maggots of different colours.
The farm, an old factory, smelled appalling quite a long way downwind. They literally put unfit meat out for their flies to lay eggs on. Dye was added to produce the different coloured maggots.
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We had "flying ant" day on Saturday just gone. Wonder where they fly to.
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>> We had "flying ant" day on Saturday just gone. Wonder where they fly to.
My conservatory, by the looks of it.
I had a call from the gardener at Dad's house this morning (he cuts lawns for a couple of the elderly neighbours, so I'd booked him to trim the hedge today as a one-off). He said the "maggots" were ant eggs, and the flies were of the ant variety. So he's done the same as Manatee, i.e. swept them out and applied powder where they appear to be getting in.
Still not pleasant, but not as bad as I'd thought. Thanks for everyone's input!
Last edited by: Dave_C220CDI on Mon 14 Jul 14 at 14:40
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When a student, I worked in a cold store. We had a delivery of frozen pigeons - carcases with feathers. It was in a freezer lorry - but was warm to the touch. We opened the case up: no pigeons, just feathers and hundreds of thousands of maggots..
Fortunately I have a strong stomach: the smell was appalling...
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>> Hoover them up and burn the bag.
What if its a bagless hoover? Seems a waste to set fire to the whole hoover ;)
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My neighbour cut his hedge on Thursday, Friday evening there was a massive swarm of bees (Wood bees according to the knowledgeable woman next door) buzzing round the hedge. The noise was loud enough to bring people out of their houses for a look. Apparently they were after the fresh sap or whatever hedges contain and by next day there wasn't a single one to be seen.
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>> Hoover them up and burn the bag.
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But who will cook dinner then? :0) Ok...I'm going.................
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It was flying ant day here today. Kitchen crawling when I got up. Dusted floor with ant killer, sprayed and went out for breakfast. There were even more when we got back, but they were all fairly poorly.
Boss swept them all up and spring cleaned the kitchen later, no trace of them for now.
Where do they come from?
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Went to check on the house today. Lots of inert ant eggs but only a couple of live (walking) ants to be seen. A few spiders' webs around the place too, even though windows and doors have been closed for months. I reckon they're getting in through the airbricks.
Gave the place a good hoover, mopped the tiled floors and reapplied ant powder in all the places they'd been seen entering or just loitering with intent.
Solicitor reckons contracts are a couple of weeks off being exchanged. Searches are taking several weeks at the moment due to job cuts in the relevant municipal departments apparently.
Manatee - I thought they only came out when there was no chance of rain? Mind you, I'm no expert, I hadn't even heard of flying ants a week ago.
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>> Where do they come from?
The ants nest.
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>> >> Where do they come from?
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>> The ants nest.
Ok Flippant and juvenile I know.
In reality the ants have access to your kitchen for some time through some crevice or hole or run, and have been foraging around in there - possibly unknown or unseen by you. Under kitchen units is a favourite. Come flying days, they all stream out of previously used crevices, and bingo into your kitchen. Sometimes you can seem them preparing, small piles of debris they have cleared prior to mass flying orgy.
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We do get ants (crawling ones) now and again. Not seen for a couple of years though. When we get them we use tactical ant powder to corral them, and bait stations to kill them off.
Ants nests in various parts of the garden anyway, and thanks to gas regs a damn great hole in the wall too.
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>>and thanks to gas regs a damn great hole in the wall too.
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Many years ago I/we had a near miss re carbon monoxide poisoning from a multi point ( Ascot? type) gas powered water heater in a small bathroom.
A flue design that was later banned and mainly insufficient ventilation were the causes.
At the time I was ignorant of situation but shudder when I think of the near miss.
I have a fan assisted room sealed boiler in my kitchen so I feel a little safer
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Researchers Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson estimate that there are upwards of 10,000,000,000,000,000 individual ants alive on Earth at any given time.
Resistance is futile.
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>>It was flying ant day here today.<<
Here too, but so was yesterday and the day before....
Under the kitchen units appears to be where they are coming from and have appeared during the heat of the afternoon for the last three days.
Facia board removed yesterday and dusted around the whole length of the kitchen units with ant powder so we'll soon see if it works or not.
The field of barley behind my garden was combined on Thursday and baled yesterday so the four cats are seeing who can bring in the biggest mouse at the moment.
I have cucumbers galore in the greenhouse while the tomatoes are flatly refusing to turn from their delicate shade of green despite all this sun. How frustrating!
Pat
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No more ants today, but half a dozen or more 6-7mm long black beetles in hall.
Could be lesser mealworm beetles. Supposedly found in association with poultry, but the chickens are 50 yards away in the garden!
What's occurring? Global warming I reckon.
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>> What's occurring? Global warming I reckon.
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Spanish plume.
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I had ants around a gas boiler and used an aerosol, forgetting about the butane propellant and the pilot light.
Eyebrows grew back, eventually!
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Pest control issue in unoccupied house - bathtub tom
