fly control, it's actually working (and costs very little $$)

BA (before alpaca), I don’t remember ever seeing flies when I was outside. Now they seem to be everywhere. I’ve done a lot of research, and found one potential remedy that, amazingly enough on Day 4 seems to be working, and best of all, costs virtually nothing.

I cannot find the original post on a discussion forum I had found so I could link to it, but it went something like this:

Him: “Why do you have bags with water all over the place?”
The Rancher: “To keep the flies away.”
Him: “Does it work?”
The Rancher: “Do you see any flies?”

The Rancher explained flies process images in such a way that to them when they come up to the bag, to them the water looks like a humongous and very scary spiderweb. A penny is added to each bag to fool the fly into thinking the penny is the scary, scary spider waiting to eat them.

Intrigued? Setting them up is easy peasy. You will need:

Glad Ziplock bags (I'd recommend you don't skimp here, b/c water is heavy and you want the bag to hold up and last, ~$3 for a bag of 20)

A penny (spider) for each bag

Water

Clothespins (I use 3/web) (I found a huge bag at Walmart for $1)

Simply put one penny in each bag, fill each about 1/4 of the way with water (this way you can flatten out the top and fold it over the fence), and hang them around the paddock on the fence with clothespins (I used 3/bag, water is heavy).

The alpacas are curious about them, but one sniff and that's about it.



The jury is still out, but here are the results so far:

Day 1, no results.
Day 2, still a lot of flies, but less than usual.
Day 3, today, amazingly enough, there were far fewer flies!
Day 4, it was sunny out today and we definitely had LESS flies than we would have!!

The sun’s coming out tomorrow too (for us usually our worst fly days), it will be interesting to see how well these continue to work. I’ll keep you posted.

If you decide to give it a whirl, I'd love to know how it works for you.