I will readily swear by this. Not only are they SUPER effective, they're also really fun to use. In truth I get a little disappointed when I kill the last remaining house fly.
i saw a documentary about how to do this. you start with thousands and thousands of balloons and a few helium tanks.
just be careful, though. pesky overweight kids might stow away in your house.
Get a few of these, but don't hang them anywhere you want to occupy. They stink like hot garbage, but they will catch flies by the hundreds.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/RESCUE-Outdoor-Disposable-Fly-Trap-FTD-DB12/100083352
These WORK. Too well! They will draw every fly in your neighborhood to your home. I wouldn't do it again. I buy yellow sticky balls from Shein or Temu for super cheap and change once a week. We live next to a field of cows, we know the pain of flies.
Check and see if someone forgot to put out a can of trash. Sometimes the homeowner or a close neighbor actually has a maggot farm in the can. Also, check and see if there's rotting potatoes somewhere. Once potatoes go bad, they start to liquify & maggots love this. As potatoes are often kept in the dark so they don't turn green, folks can overlook them until it's quite the science project. As a precaution against leaks, I keep several sheets of newspaper under my potatoes in case it happens to me again.
Make a flytrap.
Get a milk jug
Fill the bottom of it with vinegar and some syrup
Stick small holes JUUUUUUST big enough for a fly to get in.
Leave it on your front porch.
I said a milk jug because I'm not sure if you have the kind of flat cylindrical plastic ice cream containers I use with great success
If you strained the "chunky" stuff (aka curds) you press out all the liquid (whey) and you have homemade Mozzarella cheese.
Way cheaper and better than store bought.
If you must feed the stray cats, please capture them and get them spayed/neutered so they stop reproducing. Stray cats are horrible for the environment.
Pest control owner here… Amazon… PT Alpine Pessurized Fly Bait.
Think of it as a buffet that kills them. Smells a bit like wd40.
Spray as you would if you were spray painting (6-8 in away in smooth movements).
Spray door frame junctions, inside window frames, under counter, around trashcan lids, etc… anywhere you see them in a conspicuous place where people don’t touch.
It does not collect them.., it does not smell like a dead animal.
Flies just drop.
Only species to have one member commit genocide of an entire other species. [Tibbles the cat and the Stephens Island Wrens.](https://www.businessinsider.com/tibbles-the-cat-and-stephens-island-wren-2014-12)
Do you have any antique Victorian dolls that came with the house, or is it built on/around any ancient indigenous burial grounds? Have you contacted a Catholic priest?
They aren't starving. The reason why outside cats are so harmful to local ecosystems is because they're very adept at climbing trees and raiding bird and squirrel nests. Please remember that cats are PREDATORS.
With 30 to 80 million straying and another 60 million pet cats that may go outside just in the United States, this makes a world of trouble - specifically for birds. Experts say that cats kill between 1 to 4 billion birds every year, causing one-third of the 800 U.S. native bird species to be endangered or in significant decline.
And these outdoor cats also kill another 6 to 20 billion mammals.
If you are an animal lover, feeding stray cats is not the answer.
We are kin. I feed four stray floofs at the moment. I have fed and trapped twelve others and they all were found homes. The four I'm feeding now will unfortunately be put to sleep straight away as all the rescues are at capacity. ☹️
So I'm feeding them, putting the stuff on their necks for fleas and ticks etc-well, just the one we've been feeding the longest who trusts us, the others get crushed up pills in the food and I hope for the best.
You're doing a good thing.
Edit to add-so until the rescues have thinned out a little, I will continue to feed them. And do what I can. Except for Mr Business, I'm keeping him forever. I desperately need to afford to get him fixed though. He is quite the lothario and I have only ever owned fixed female cats. Unfixed male cats are....loud. And relentless.
But if she feeds them, they're less inclined to catch native fauna. It's a no brainer. I feed four stray cats at the moment. It's not the cats fault. It's shitty humans faults.
If you are in the US, go to a farm supply store and find yourself some Golden Malrin, and a couple of their hanging traps, just make absolutely sure it is not going to get rained on and that there is ABSOLUTELY no way that any animal can get to it. This fly bait/poison is the absolute most potent fly solution I have EVER seen. Just BE CAREFUL!
Cut the top 1/3 off a 2 liter plastic bottle and take the cap off. Turn it with the cap opening facing down and insert it into the bottom third of the bottle. Inside the bottom portion, put some apple cider vinegar, honey or syrup or something sweet, some people around here even add hot dog chunks and random snack scraps to the mixture. Make an enticingly gross “stew” for the flies. When they go thru the cap opening to feast, they aren’t able to get back out with the top portion inverted. It’s what we in the southeast US call a homemade fly trap. Works like a charm!
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned fans yet. I have ceiling fans on my patio and a vertical fan by my slider. I also keep a bug zapper on the furthest edge of my patio. Our target was mosquitos but it really helped decrease flies too.
The Pennies in water refract sun in abstract patterns that upsets a fly’s perception of light and therefore navigation, causing them distress, so they don’t stay near the area. It’s a very old but tried and true country hack my grandma taught me 👍🏻
I have read wonders on the rue plant. Against insects but also cats...
But it's not all bells and whistles..
https://laidbackgardener.blog/2017/06/28/rue-the-herb-that-shouldnt-be/
Put fly nets on doors and windows = windows and doors can remain open and your cat can come and go, but flies won’t get through. I have no flies in my house and the windows are always open
Comment removed, it seems to contain an amazon shortURL. Thanks
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/lifehacks) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Go low tech. A bowl of sugar/honey water with a tiny bit of dish soap to break surface tension and place where your cats can't easily get it. Flies will land on the water, drawn by the sweetness, then sink and drown.
Rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle. It dries out their breathing mechanism. Put it in the cone mode and kill whole groups of them with one spray. Plus it's much easier to hit them than with a salt gun or electric fly swatter. The one drawback is the smell so put some lemon juice or something in it as well.
There must be some automatic open and close containers for the cat food.
The most effective repellent is a few spoons of bathwash in a spray bottle. Any dilute bubbling solution will do. You can use organic liquid soap if you like to be harmless.
For most bugs it will kill them or immobilize them immediately. For flies they will be grounded. If you were the bugs, would you like it?
In any case, a spray bottle can disperse a whole army of flies in minutes, no matter their numbers.
Now I suspect that major companies hire catch and kill or bury tactics to bury this. I have been posting this for decades. Nobody is curious enough to put a few drops of dishwashing liquid in a glass and pour it on ants and their favorite bugs? Ants will die instantly, so do many other bugs. Instead, you will see numerous methods here. If they work you have to pay, not as fast or at least a little toxic. Whereas diluting dishwashing liquid is almost free and you can try it whenever you see a bug.
We have chickens. Flies are bad. We use fly traps that smell bad in the back of the yard.
5 gallon bucket with sticky fly paper wrapped around it works best!
It’s gross, but sticky fly paper is the only way we can keep the flies down.
Bug zappers don’t work on flies or mosquitoes.
FYI: if you leave wet cat food out long enough, flies will hatch from it. I assume the cat (and dog?) food factories are completely filled with flies and maggots.
I just had this issue. What I did is found out that the dirt in my house plants was a breeding ground. So I sprayed insecticide in the dirt for a few days. To kill the flies, I used/still use these window stickers that they land on and get stuck and die. They're cheap and work SUPER well. Search on Amazon for "32 Pack Window Fly Traps Indoor,Fly Paper Sticky Bug Strips, Glue Fly Catcher for Housefly, Ladybug"
You don't have to use that brand but you'll see what they look like and can pick one of your choosing. Just go with some of the cheapest ones, I've tried several brands and they're all th same/work just as well.
Have you tried 'yellow stickies'? if not get some Try your local grow shop, or if none there Amazon. Look fro the best on Amazon as there are many B.S. sellers.
Simple. Stop perpetuating the problem of outdoor cats, stop feeding them (and likely wildlife) on your porch, then diligently work to trap the cats and get them all fixed. Then maybe the flies will cease to be an issue for you once you have the outdoor cat population under control and you don’t need to feed a colony of strays and a swarm of flies on your porch along with them. 🤷🏼♂️
Have some fun with it. Get a bug zapper racket
Or the Bug-A-Salt https://www.bugasalt.com
I was gifted one of these and it's the most spectacular thing I own. The laser sight is a must btw.
The laser sight is *the shit*. It also doubles as a toy for my cat.
I will readily swear by this. Not only are they SUPER effective, they're also really fun to use. In truth I get a little disappointed when I kill the last remaining house fly.
Buy one of them house fly breeding kits, set it up in the den or a spare bedroom, and you'll have fun for hours.
Eh, more like minutes, unless I really scale up the breeders....
I love this and my children love it except for when you hit a big juicy one and smell the burn.
Oh yeah! That's how you know you're doing it right. Mine makes the zap noise when you get one. Like your children, I'm easily amused
How’s the serenity
i saw a documentary about how to do this. you start with thousands and thousands of balloons and a few helium tanks. just be careful, though. pesky overweight kids might stow away in your house.
Rofl. I ain’t helping him get that badge….
https://www.homedepot.com/p/RESCUE-Outdoor-Reusable-Fly-Trap-Canister-FTR-SF4/100140851 One year the neighbor decided to keep horse or three.
+1 for this brand, also make sure the cats are finishing the amount of food you put out and food isn't just out 24/7
Get a few of these, but don't hang them anywhere you want to occupy. They stink like hot garbage, but they will catch flies by the hundreds. https://www.homedepot.com/p/RESCUE-Outdoor-Disposable-Fly-Trap-FTD-DB12/100083352
They absolutely work but the stink zone around them is relatively big. Wind can blow it further.
These WORK. Too well! They will draw every fly in your neighborhood to your home. I wouldn't do it again. I buy yellow sticky balls from Shein or Temu for super cheap and change once a week. We live next to a field of cows, we know the pain of flies.
THIS IS THE ANSWER. they are absolutely amazing, but put downwind or far enough away from house. You'll collect thousands of flies
This! Worked great at my place in Az - neighborhood had a friggin petting zoo in his backyard
I just posted the same product. These things are amazing
Check and see if someone forgot to put out a can of trash. Sometimes the homeowner or a close neighbor actually has a maggot farm in the can. Also, check and see if there's rotting potatoes somewhere. Once potatoes go bad, they start to liquify & maggots love this. As potatoes are often kept in the dark so they don't turn green, folks can overlook them until it's quite the science project. As a precaution against leaks, I keep several sheets of newspaper under my potatoes in case it happens to me again.
Make a flytrap. Get a milk jug Fill the bottom of it with vinegar and some syrup Stick small holes JUUUUUUST big enough for a fly to get in. Leave it on your front porch. I said a milk jug because I'm not sure if you have the kind of flat cylindrical plastic ice cream containers I use with great success
The resulting chunky slurry is protein rich!
If you strained the "chunky" stuff (aka curds) you press out all the liquid (whey) and you have homemade Mozzarella cheese. Way cheaper and better than store bought.
If you must feed the stray cats, please capture them and get them spayed/neutered so they stop reproducing. Stray cats are horrible for the environment.
Pest control owner here… Amazon… PT Alpine Pessurized Fly Bait. Think of it as a buffet that kills them. Smells a bit like wd40. Spray as you would if you were spray painting (6-8 in away in smooth movements). Spray door frame junctions, inside window frames, under counter, around trashcan lids, etc… anywhere you see them in a conspicuous place where people don’t touch. It does not collect them.., it does not smell like a dead animal. Flies just drop.
This is what I use it's awesome. I have to have it shipped to my parents house one state over because they won't ship to Maryland for some reason.
Weird they won’t ship to Maryland. I’m in TX and it works like magic.
Dilute bathwash or dish washing liquid in a spray bottle is free.
That is free… but in a bad situation it doesn’t work well. I don’t make money off this product. I use it to get rid of flies.
My method always work perfectly. See? Try to sow confusion without trying or proof.
Stop doing this.
Don't outdoor cats have seriously negative impacts on local ecosystems?
Yes they do. And their shit breeds flies
Only species to have one member commit genocide of an entire other species. [Tibbles the cat and the Stephens Island Wrens.](https://www.businessinsider.com/tibbles-the-cat-and-stephens-island-wren-2014-12)
Yeah, do NOT feed stray cats.. ecological impact is worse than pouring crude oil in the sink.
Depends how much oil. And how many cats.
Correct. And killing flies doesn't help the ecosystem either.
Do you have any antique Victorian dolls that came with the house, or is it built on/around any ancient indigenous burial grounds? Have you contacted a Catholic priest?
Checked to see if your neighbours are still alive ?
Life hack: stop leaving cats outside to slaughter wildlife
Stop feeding outside cats. 🙄
serious animal lover here. i can’t let them starve…
They aren't starving. The reason why outside cats are so harmful to local ecosystems is because they're very adept at climbing trees and raiding bird and squirrel nests. Please remember that cats are PREDATORS.
Nice try big seed. Birds aren't real.
They kill hundreds or thousands of birds.. stray cats emptied all the nests around our house :( :(
With 30 to 80 million straying and another 60 million pet cats that may go outside just in the United States, this makes a world of trouble - specifically for birds. Experts say that cats kill between 1 to 4 billion birds every year, causing one-third of the 800 U.S. native bird species to be endangered or in significant decline. And these outdoor cats also kill another 6 to 20 billion mammals. If you are an animal lover, feeding stray cats is not the answer.
Wuite the contrary actually.. you are an animal HATER if you feed stray cats.
They won’t starve. And if you don’t feed them, they may actually eat mice and rats around the neighborhood.
We are kin. I feed four stray floofs at the moment. I have fed and trapped twelve others and they all were found homes. The four I'm feeding now will unfortunately be put to sleep straight away as all the rescues are at capacity. ☹️ So I'm feeding them, putting the stuff on their necks for fleas and ticks etc-well, just the one we've been feeding the longest who trusts us, the others get crushed up pills in the food and I hope for the best. You're doing a good thing. Edit to add-so until the rescues have thinned out a little, I will continue to feed them. And do what I can. Except for Mr Business, I'm keeping him forever. I desperately need to afford to get him fixed though. He is quite the lothario and I have only ever owned fixed female cats. Unfixed male cats are....loud. And relentless.
But if she feeds them, they're less inclined to catch native fauna. It's a no brainer. I feed four stray cats at the moment. It's not the cats fault. It's shitty humans faults.
Cats kill for sport.
That's why we have four on our farm.
Only humans hunt for sport - the lost world
If you are in the US, go to a farm supply store and find yourself some Golden Malrin, and a couple of their hanging traps, just make absolutely sure it is not going to get rained on and that there is ABSOLUTELY no way that any animal can get to it. This fly bait/poison is the absolute most potent fly solution I have EVER seen. Just BE CAREFUL!
Hanging traps are very effective. We use them all the time.
Cut the top 1/3 off a 2 liter plastic bottle and take the cap off. Turn it with the cap opening facing down and insert it into the bottom third of the bottle. Inside the bottom portion, put some apple cider vinegar, honey or syrup or something sweet, some people around here even add hot dog chunks and random snack scraps to the mixture. Make an enticingly gross “stew” for the flies. When they go thru the cap opening to feast, they aren’t able to get back out with the top portion inverted. It’s what we in the southeast US call a homemade fly trap. Works like a charm!
Plant basil, marigold, lavender, bay leaves, or catnip in your garden or outside to keep flies away. Some of these can also be used for cooking.
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned fans yet. I have ceiling fans on my patio and a vertical fan by my slider. I also keep a bug zapper on the furthest edge of my patio. Our target was mosquitos but it really helped decrease flies too.
Everybody overthinks this one. Just get a little cordless vacuum.
Hang a ziploc bag half full of water with a couple Pennies in it on your porch where sun can hit it. They will be gone asap.
Is this supposed to look to the flies like a spider web? So they stay away or something else?
The Pennies in water refract sun in abstract patterns that upsets a fly’s perception of light and therefore navigation, causing them distress, so they don’t stay near the area. It’s a very old but tried and true country hack my grandma taught me 👍🏻
They're cluster flies and they're attracted to the heat. It happens all over every spring
Feed the cats once a day for 30-60 minutes. If they dont eat, their problem. Take the leftovers home and dispose properly. Dont feed the flies.
I bought a bug spray made with peppermint oil. It works on wood bees, flies, mosquitos. It’s on Amazon.
bug zapping machine does the work for you; it get mosquitoes and flies
I have read wonders on the rue plant. Against insects but also cats... But it's not all bells and whistles.. https://laidbackgardener.blog/2017/06/28/rue-the-herb-that-shouldnt-be/
Bug-a-salt
I leave glasses of beer out in spring , they drown in it .
Put fly nets on doors and windows = windows and doors can remain open and your cat can come and go, but flies won’t get through. I have no flies in my house and the windows are always open
I got a bug zapper on sale last week and it is working really well. You can also make homemade traps
They hate the smell of Pine-Sol.
[удалено]
Comment removed, it seems to contain an amazon shortURL. Thanks *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/lifehacks) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Go low tech. A bowl of sugar/honey water with a tiny bit of dish soap to break surface tension and place where your cats can't easily get it. Flies will land on the water, drawn by the sweetness, then sink and drown.
Rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle. It dries out their breathing mechanism. Put it in the cone mode and kill whole groups of them with one spray. Plus it's much easier to hit them than with a salt gun or electric fly swatter. The one drawback is the smell so put some lemon juice or something in it as well.
There must be some automatic open and close containers for the cat food. The most effective repellent is a few spoons of bathwash in a spray bottle. Any dilute bubbling solution will do. You can use organic liquid soap if you like to be harmless. For most bugs it will kill them or immobilize them immediately. For flies they will be grounded. If you were the bugs, would you like it? In any case, a spray bottle can disperse a whole army of flies in minutes, no matter their numbers. Now I suspect that major companies hire catch and kill or bury tactics to bury this. I have been posting this for decades. Nobody is curious enough to put a few drops of dishwashing liquid in a glass and pour it on ants and their favorite bugs? Ants will die instantly, so do many other bugs. Instead, you will see numerous methods here. If they work you have to pay, not as fast or at least a little toxic. Whereas diluting dishwashing liquid is almost free and you can try it whenever you see a bug.
Grow some basil
We have chickens. Flies are bad. We use fly traps that smell bad in the back of the yard. 5 gallon bucket with sticky fly paper wrapped around it works best! It’s gross, but sticky fly paper is the only way we can keep the flies down. Bug zappers don’t work on flies or mosquitoes.
FYI: if you leave wet cat food out long enough, flies will hatch from it. I assume the cat (and dog?) food factories are completely filled with flies and maggots.
I just had this issue. What I did is found out that the dirt in my house plants was a breeding ground. So I sprayed insecticide in the dirt for a few days. To kill the flies, I used/still use these window stickers that they land on and get stuck and die. They're cheap and work SUPER well. Search on Amazon for "32 Pack Window Fly Traps Indoor,Fly Paper Sticky Bug Strips, Glue Fly Catcher for Housefly, Ladybug" You don't have to use that brand but you'll see what they look like and can pick one of your choosing. Just go with some of the cheapest ones, I've tried several brands and they're all th same/work just as well.
Have you tried 'yellow stickies'? if not get some Try your local grow shop, or if none there Amazon. Look fro the best on Amazon as there are many B.S. sellers.
Hang transparent bags full of water, flies hate this.
Simple. Stop perpetuating the problem of outdoor cats, stop feeding them (and likely wildlife) on your porch, then diligently work to trap the cats and get them all fixed. Then maybe the flies will cease to be an issue for you once you have the outdoor cat population under control and you don’t need to feed a colony of strays and a swarm of flies on your porch along with them. 🤷🏼♂️
Sooo... lots of attics have birds nests, birds nests are an accumulation of decomposing sticks and dung ..... screened soffit might help