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Hello, this is Ben. And it’s time for another one of the Ben’s pest control podcasts. And today I want to do a show about flies. Now, flies are very interesting because we don’t really see a whole lot of flies, nor do we do a whole lot with flies. Flies are very interesting. pests in the pest world, they are always associated with things like filth, and dirt, and decaying, especially decaying vegetation, decaying plants. And whenever you have a fly problem, flies are always associated with something that is, is in the state of decay. We get a lot of fruit flies. Normally, again, when by as the name states, they are around fruit that is been sitting and is starting the process of actually usually going bad. We get drained flies, which are very common pests here in Florida, we get all sorts of house flies, horse flies, there’s just a whole different bunch of different species in the fly world. But the reason I’m doing this articles right now we are seeing a lot of drain flies in the Treasure Coast area. We have had probably 10 calls in the last month for flies. And it’s it’s very, very interesting to kind of try to figure out what’s going on in each situation. So when I talk about flies, a lot of times the things that I discuss are, is there anything that could be there that’s a decaying or that’s not that’s not necessarily been cleaned up. And and when I say that I don’t want to say that people aren’t clean, because I have had people that are very clean. But in one lady’s instance, a piece of fruit had fallen down onto the floor and rolled up underneath this fruit stand that she had in her house. And it was it was a small stand, but it stood kind of tall with different shelves and she stored fruits and vegetables on the shelf. And that was enough that after had rolled under there and she didn’t know it was there. Over time the flies were breeding in it and they were getting really bad and they were driving her crazy. I have one lady right now here on the Treasure Coast that very clean. They appear that like they don’t have a whole lot of food, their fruit is on their refrigerator. And of here’s like they were just really really bad, so bad that that we found dead ones in the freezer and the refrigerator in her case, I believe what was going on was because she had no other food sources. The flies were actually desperate trying to get into the refrigerator and freezer to get to the food and try to do their reproductive cycle lay their eggs and those types of things. Now, one of the things that we see and we mentioned in her case, is that it is possible for flies to come up through your drains. A lot of times drains for sinks, tubs, they are designed to have what they call a P trap in it. And the P trap is designed to have water. Well if that P trap doesn’t have water in it and it dries out what you can get is you can get an open source from the sewage line right into the house. And that allows the opportunity for those flies to come up from the sewer, and then get inside and then that can be a real problem. So I tell people all the time, it’s very important that you make sure that you run water in all of your sinks your drains. So there needs to be water in your toilet there needs to be water run through your sinks, your showers, your tubs. Any place like that and including like where your washing machine drains. Anything that you’ve got for a drain in the house that’s designed for water to go down. It’s supposed to have water in it so that trap doesn’t allow the things that are in the sewer system to come up. Now.
One of the things I always say so specifically fruit flies, Fruit flies are usually pretty easy to determine if you have that species of fly. The fruit fly is going to be drawn to fruit. It is very drawn to wine. It can be drawn to vinegar. As a matter of fact, there are some home remedies where you put dish soap and vinegar in a cup. And you just put like a plastic lid over it and you put some small holes where the flies can get in. And usually you can use that as a trap to draw the fruit flies and they’ll get stuck in there. So That’s one way you can tell if you have fruit flies. house flies are almost in my experience, a lot of times house flies are drawn to areas where there’s decay. We see a lot of house flies, when there’s a dead rodent. We see house flies, we’ve seen them outside when people have had, heaven forbid a rabbit dead in their bushes or a snake that in their bushes. house flies are almost always going to be associated with death and decay. So the only thing that kind of helps with the determining that species is usually there’s some kind of rotten smell around where you’re having those types of flies. So if you can find that and get rid of it, usually you can stop the house flies. When it comes to your drains, one of the things I like to suggest is, for most people, if you have a garbage disposal, garbage disposals are interesting devices that grind up food. And sometimes in that garbage disposal, the reason they have like the rubber caps is to prevent anything from shooting out of the garbage disposal, and hopefully to prevent you from sticking your hand in the garbage disposal. But that rubber ring will prevent food. So if food flies around in there, what you got to think about is, it would be very easy as food gets ground up for it to fly up and get under the rim of the garbage disposal. So one of the suggestions I like to make is to take your sink off, put the old fashioned dishwasher stopper in the sink, fill it up with really hot soapy water, Dawn Palmolive, whatever you got, fill it all the way up, pull the plug on that turn on your garbage that was wet, all that water go down. And hopefully that garbage disposal will spin that soapy water around trying to clean up some of your garbage disposal. Do not underestimate that maybe food or something got in the bottom of your garbage can. I’ll be honest with you, I have children and they don’t always pay attention to garbage bags being in the can. So if one of my kids had gone to the garbage can thrown something in the garbage can, there was no bag, there could be food or something decaying in the bottom that garbage can. Or you could have a similar situation in garbage cans in bedrooms or bathrooms. You always got to take a look at the garbage cans and it’s a good idea to clean them out on a regular basis. It is very common restaurants have to clean out their garbage cans every few days and spray them out to make sure that the food and even the the liquid from certain foods as it’s cooked or prepared. Or even sometimes it’s just bad isn’t just sitting in the bottom of the garbage can. That liquid is food and it’s decomposing and they have to clean those areas out.
Along with that, I guess one of the things I would say is probably important to address right now here on the Treasure Coast at least in Port St. Lucie. We’re going through an issue with our garbage removal. I can’t speak for all of Port St. Lucie. But where I live, we are supposed to have our garbage pickup on Wednesday and Saturday. And our recycling picked up on Saturday. Our personal recycling has not been picked up on Saturday for a month. It is not uncommon for our recycling truck not to show up till Wednesday. And if your recycling containers aren’t rinsed out and cleaned out there again, you have a source where where food can be sitting in the bottom of that container, and drive and help promote flies from breeding in there. And the same goes for your garbage can. Where garbage gets picked up on Wednesday and Saturday. Well at least that’s when it was supposed to. I don’t remember. Well, let me take let me go back. I do remember last week, our garbage day was Wednesday. They didn’t show up till Friday. And then our next garbage day was Saturday. Well, needless to say they didn’t show up Saturday. So again, we have garbage and food sitting around. In some communities I know that only have trash pickup and Portsmouth Lucy’s gonna go to this once a week. I know a lot of people who take their food scraps and they put them in a bag and they put them in the freezer until the day before the trash pickup. So this way, the food scraps stay frozen. And they don’t have that food sitting in their garage or sitting outside decomposing, drawing bugs drawing animals and giving a source for things to breed in. So as crazy as it sounds, sometimes you got to take some extra steps and and I believe here in Portugal see we may be in that same boat here soon as we’re going to have to adapt to a world of once a week pickup and what that could mean as far as the garbage and the garbage sitting and decomposing and possibly rotting. So if you have flies and you’re interested in one of our free 58 Point inspections, please check out our website at WWW dot bends pest stop is or give us a call at 772-878-1972 and we’ll be happy to give you one of our free 58 Point PEST analysis and go over what we can do to help you hopefully control your flies. So Thank you and have a great day