How To Hang Water Bags For Flies

Can Yous Repel Flies With Water-Filled Bags?

By Chris Williams on March 28, 2013.

Question

I found some data on the Internet about how you lot can hang bags of water on your deck to keep flies away when you're eating outside. Somehow they see their reflection and are scared abroad. Does this really work?

Answer

I've been wondering when I would get this question. For some reason, this method of fly control has go very pop, especially amid outdoor restaurants. When traveling in the Southwest, we saw more one eating house that had aught-lock baggies of water hanging under each tabular array umbrella in the outdoor seating surface area. Restaurant owners seem to swear by this nontoxic method, their patrons are amazed that at that place are no flies, and the customers take the thought home with them. At that place are actually Internet entrepreneurs that will sell you lot all the makings for your very ain zip-lock pocketbook wing repellent system.

If yous search this idea on the Internet, you'll find many different homemade versions. Some say apply just a one-half bag of plain water. Others say the baggie has to contain a penny, or exactly 4 pennies, or bits of floating aluminum foil. There are too multiple explanations every bit to why this supposedly works. One is that flies are frightened abroad by their own reflection, or by the reflecting foil or pennies. Or that flies are agape of drowning. A more reasonable caption is that information technology'southward but light refraction through the handbag and the water that keeps the flies away.

A business firm fly has a complex visual system consisting of two large circuitous eyes that are each made up of thousands of simple eyes. Each simple middle provides i small visual slice of the picture, sort of like pixels on a screen. All of the pieces from each of the optics together make up the total picture for a fly. It's theorized that when these complex eyes feel refracted light traveling through the h2o bag, the picture is scrambled and the wing becomes confused.

Entomology professor Mike Stringham of North Carolina University decided to put the water baggies to a scientific test. His sites were two egg-product farms where y'all can be sure in that location were enough of flies. I won't get into detail but suffice information technology to say that he spent 13 weeks measuring fly activity in the two sites past counting the number of wing specks that he establish. His conclusion was that sites with the water numberless actually had more fly action. However, proponents of the baggie arrangement fence that he didn't examination the numberless outdoors in sunlit conditions which could brand a difference.

There is no scientific reason why the baggies should work. So, why do people call back they work? Maybe because in that location was no real fly problem in the commencement place. Bottom line: If information technology makes you experience better to hang water bags on your deck, get ahead. But the best way to command flies is good sanitation. Flies brood in garbage, creature feces, and carcasses. If it'due south not there, they won't come. I worry virtually a eating house that feels it has enough of a fly problem that it needs to hang water baggies! Can't be expert for business.

Photo credit: silverfuture / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA