The Common Housefly, A Cussed Little Critter
Posted: Friday, February 01, 2008
by Joel Hendon
http://hebronics.org/index.html
As those of you who have read some of my articles know, I was raised in the foothills of east-central Alabama from the heart of the "Great Depression" until I was grown. Times were hard and virtually all of the rural people in our area were very poor. Most of us lived fairly well but only because of an assiduous approach towards self sufficiency. Our lives were constantly exposed to health hazards due to an almost total lack of protective facilities, and knowledge, that we now have. Women of the household had a tremendous task in trying to conserve and save food by canning and by drying fruit, etc. But one of her most arduous tasks was that of keeping the family, home, clothes, food and other items, clean.
We had no screens on our windows. We had no means of cooling the house in summer, except for opening the windows and hoping for a stray molecule of air to pass through. Now with that said, we had animals. We kept two mules, sometimes as many as 6 or 8 of the bovine family. About that many pigs and hogs. About that many cats and 2-4 dogs, and perhaps 30 to 40 chickens. Now, if you have any experience with animals, even a dog or cat, you have a miniscule familiarity with the fact that their feces presents at least a small undesirable problem.
I grew up thinking that the housefly's only undesirable trait was their pesky and bothersome buzzing around you and lighting upon your surroundings. They diminished somewhat during the cold months but were overwhelming during hot weather. They had complete and total access to our home so they swarmed us. The really awful part and feature that is difficult to learn to live with was their tenacious desire to partake of our food at meal time. We are not talking about one, now. We are talking about dozens. Each of us individually had to fend for our self and it seemingly required eating with one hand and waving the other to keep them airborne. When we had company, one of us would have to stand with a small, but long, limb with leaves on it and sweep it back and forth over the heads of those eating. After a meal, if there were any droplets of spilled milk, syrup, soup or any such, they would literally encircle those drops like hogs around their trough. I learned that with a swift swing of the open hand, you could grasp a dozen or so. I would invariably do that then throw them with a smash against the floor. I always got yelled at and my mother made me wash my hands and sweep out the dead flies. As we came out of the depression era, and work became available for our dad, one of his first priorities was screen doors and windows. It helped a lot but not totally.
Now, as I said in the beginning, I was not aware of the hazards of the housefly until I was about grown anyway, I really don't remember when I learned of the possible harm which would be caused by them. But they are sorry critters from the beginning. The female fly lays her eggs (several hundred) in decaying vegetable matter, compost or MANURE! There is little question as to where our houseflies came from seeing as we had an abundance of composting manure almost constantly. That is enough to make me nauseos even today when I realize the number of the little beggars that out done me at times and managed to land on some of my food regardless of how hard I tried to keep them off.
As time goes on, I continue to learn of the dangers involved with those varmints. Red this paragraph taken from http://www.flybusters.com
The housefly, Musca domestica, is a small, two-winged fly, gray with dark stripes, often found in and around human habitations. Houseflies are major pests. If it has recently walked in excrement, it may transmit pathogens causing typhoid, cholera, dysentery, leprosy, poliomyelitis, and infectious hepatitis, as well as the eggs of parasitic worms. Many hundreds of thousands of people living along Africa's rivers are permanently blinded by small roundworms introduced by the bite of the blackfly.
Good grief! There is no wonder I was such a runt until age 12. The amazing thing about all of this, if you live a good distance from any form of decaying or rotting vegetation, or animal waste, you will rarely, if ever, see one of these little suicide bombers. We rarely have one here even in this small town with livestock within 1 mile of our house. But one occasionally sneaks in as we enter or exit. When that does happen we declare open warfare until he gives out and commits hari-kari.
This Article has been viewed 287 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.