Curse of La Mosca

Flies are the bane of summer life here in the Mediterranean countryside. This year we hunted high and low for a fly trap without success, everyone seems to be selling UV lamps or insecticide sprays. On a trip back to the UK we found two old dusty traps at the back of an agricultural supplies shop. The traps included a sachet of eco friendly bait to lure the bothersome flies into a plastic cup, where they exhaust themselves trying to find the way out and then die; before dropping into the liquid bait to become part of the lure for their cousins which are still at liberty. We read the label on the fly trap and discovered they were made in Spain! 

So on hot humid afternoons we sit and watch the flies battle each other to get to the trap’s bait first; this may possibly be the countryside version of watching the washing machine in the laundrette but it amuses us. A single female fly may produce 150 – 500 offspring according to the label, so we might need a calculator at the end of summer to work out our kill rate.