Why Are You So Flightly?

Living in the country puts one through a particular experience city-dwellers don't usually have to face. This is the scourge know as CLUSTER FLIES. As the name implies, when conditions are right  the sun heats windows, doors, frames and trim on the warm days of False Spring and Indian Summer,  Hundreds of flies emerge from wherever they happen to have been hiding  and buzz around  on windows in huge clusters.  During the day when they emerge their metabolism seems to accelerate so much that most are dead before afternoon tea.Then there's the problem of cleaning up all those dead and many not-so-dead  flies. Usually the vacuum cleaner does a good job of that.


For the first time, a few years ago, we had virtually no cluster flies for at least two seasons in a row.  Instead we had hundreds of Ladybugs or as they are more properly called, ladybird beetles. But it seems that these benign and even friendly looking beetles are an imported species run amok on this continent after some well-meaning entomologist set them loose on some unsuspecting prey.  Apparently it is possible to tell the foreign species  from the domestic by the number of spots on its back. I have seen beetles with 0, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 or more spots and I don't have the foggiest notion which might be the domestic variety. There was one that seemed to respond to "bonjour" but that could have been domestic or continental. It is apparent though, that when the beetles are around the flies are not or at least the flies appear in much, much smaller numbers. It seems that the beetles do the job for which they were imported, to eat the eggs and larvae of the pests. Purists would say that all the foreign beetles should be rounded up and deported  but they should be welcomed and encouraged with  a hearty "bon appetite!" Anything that helps control those cluster flies is welcome in my country.


Copyright 2010 The Stargeazer