Tips on how to swat a fly
A change of pace from politics, and some news you can use.
I’ve intermittently had a couple of especially pesky flies this fall. Noisy little buzzing buggers, and extraordinarily fast. They eluded my fly-swatting skills, even when I tried these handy tips.
But they might work for you.
And here’s a video that tells you a lot about the world of a fly:
At the end of salmon season, spawned out chum come back down the river and die all over the estuary. Result is huge spike in flies. This was the answer:
https://www.bugasalt.com/
I have shot them out of the air with this.
My experience with swatting flies is that the smaller the enclosed space, the greater the chance of killing it. It is not likely I’ll swat-kill a fly in the living room or in a bedroom. Successful fly swats have generally come from a closed and small bathroom. At night, turning on the bathroom light in an otherwise dark dwelling will often attract a fly.
Flies are also easier to kill in cold weather, as they are more sluggish.
Different areas have different insect issues and thus inhabitants of different areas build up different tolerances. My freshman dorm roommate was from West End Avenue in Manhattan. One day a horsefly got into our our room- the windows had no screens. My roommate freaked out over the horsefly: something out of the ordinary for Manhattan, apparently. My country boy reaction: a horsefly, so what?
For a number of years, I had a next door neighbor from Monterrey, Mexico. Monterrey is practically a desert, so it has very few mosquitos. My neighbor periodically complained to me about the mosquitos in our area. Because there were very few mosquitos compared to the swarms I experienced growing up in New England (go into the woods at night….), I hardly noticed any mosquitos at all. I also suggested to my neighbor that to repel mosquitos she might follow my diet and eat lots of garlic. 🙂
Gringo – aha, garlic for mosquitoes… will remember.
I’ve taken to swatting flies less than I used to; I now tend to wait until they get to the window and then let them out via the screen. But when I do feel the need to swat one, I usually try to swat it in mid-flight and often succeed. I’m still fast enough to be able to do that sometimes, though after a number of misses. If I’m not getting any shots on target that day, then I wait for the surface landing, again usually a window.
(Neo, the link is missing the initial ‘h’, btw.)
Are you trying to prepare us for the load of —— (with the accompanying flies) that may be about to rain down on us?
Bad link, you left the “h” off the begginning.
A kid I grew up with (don’t ask what other awful things he taught me) showed me a great way to kill flies: a carbide cannon.
Not all readers will be familiar with the carbide cannon, but it used to appear in small advertisements in comic books. It used a small charge of powdered carbide into a water chamber, which produced a bit of acetylene. A sparker unit ignited the acetylene, and the cannon (about 10 inches long) would make a loud bang. In fact it was called a Big Bang Cannon. It also produced a lot of heat, although during daylight hours we could not see any flame.
The point being, one could slowly move a carbide cannon up within about six inches of a fly and fire it. The heat was enough to burn off their wings so they could not fly. Then it was a simple matter of squishing it with whatever was at hand — a shoe, a book — whatever. Since it couldn’t fly, all the sensitive receptors in the world did it no good.
Yeah, my young friends were fiends. And that goes a long way toward explaining why I am deaf now.
After challenging me during the summer months, house flies get pathetically slow this time of year. I almost feel sorry for them.
I for one certainly needed a change of pace from politics and thanks for the use of the word buggers, it is endearing and unusual to hear it used in this context by Americans.
Ditto on the https://www.bugasalt.com/
You can go on a fly safari. Sometimes my wife acts as my spotter.
It is the funnest way to kill flies.
The best technique I’ve come up with is moving a swatter or suitable object slowly towards the fly, and only actually swatting with the last few inches, success is usually 7/10, assuming the fly is considerate enough to wait for you to get into suitable position.
A few years back I picked up the Bug-A-Salt salt shotgun to save myself the trouble, but alas it had far too little punch to kill anything. I’ve heard they made a better one, but I’m not planning to buy it unless someone personally gives me a glowing review.
If you clap your hands about an inch above the fly, you’ll often score a kill. The fly reacts to the motion, but always takes off vertically. Your palms and the fly arrive at the same point in destiny simultaneously.
I have had some luck with “flicking” a resting fly from behind: put your middle finger behind your thumb (in a cocked position, as if ready to flick a marble), move very slowly into proximity from the rear of the fly, and flick. It can stun them and then you proceed as usual.
My friend in HS taught me this –how he knew it, I have no idea– and explained that the fly has poorer vision toward its rear, and because the advance is very slow (followed by a very narrow, directed, fast flick) its air-movement sensors are less effective.
He also said (I’ve never checked) that flies take off BACKWARDS, so if they start to escape, they are actually flying right into your attack.
Fascinating. Good luck, all. Guess what: we’ll never run out of targets.
ha! For a split second when I saw the post title – “Tips on how to swat a fly” – I thought this was going to be a post on how Republicans in Congress should deal with Biden.
Indoor bug zapper (Amazon has a few, the 20 watt $39 one works particularly well).
If airborne pests are a continual problem, plug it in, it will take care of it. If only occasional, put it on a digital timer – 15 minutes every other hour seems to work well (program once, plug in and forget). It doesn’t do a bad job as a night light if that’s also what you’re after.
The plus is it will take care of everything, even the little “no see-ums” you’re probably not even aware of and the random mosquito.
Unless you’re starved for activity, let the machine do the brainless grunt work so your time can be devoted to more productive, or enjoyable, pursuits.
I gladly cede the fly swatting duty to my wife who has an innate talent when it comes to that deadly art.
One of the creepiest things that ever happened to me:
I swatted a fly on a window sill; the window limited the fly’s ability to get away.
The fly broke in half, and the front half walked away.
I get lots of the little micro house flies, especially in the summer, and especially if I’ve neglected cleaning the cat boxes.
I use the electric badminton racket type of fly swatter. The swoosh-ZARCH is very satisfying.
My hands used to be fast enough to allow me to catch the ones buzzing in front of me in one hand, about 20% of the time. Enough to have success more often than getting tired of trying.
Using a fly swatter on a fly that has landed is about 40-50%.
Slowly putting two hands on either side above the landed fly works about 33% of the time to get a shot – which itself works about 60-70%.
I hate flys. I do like to kill them.
I don’t like flyblood on my hands tho, so sometimes I have gotten one but, because of not squishing (when I could), the fly gets away.
More often it falls on the floor, dazed or buzzing without flight – I step on it. (part of it working).
Flypaper in the pantry also works, but after 3 or more flies and a couple of weeks it starts looking gross.
I use fly paper, problem solved.
I was gifted a couple of fly zappers They look something like short-handled badminton racquets. They have a mesh of charged wires and a battery in the handle. When you hit a fly, there’s a flash and a ZAP. Immensely satisfying.
Since swatting fly means moving the weapon fast, you’re constrained by not wanting to hit anything fragile in the area.
So, for example, I might put out a small bowl of cider or cheap wine. Then I swing the zapping paddle horizontally over the bait. No danger to the dish or counter. May get one or two. And then, practically immediately, get a couple of more.
One evening, with a swarm of biting flies, I went onto my porch–full dark–and started swinging. Must have killed fifty. Hate the little buggers. Swing at the back of my legs where I feel them, kill two or three. Lit up the night.
Fun, if you resent them.
Tried it. Didn’t work. Jim Acosta got away.
I like the electric racket thingies too.
I possessed one for about 20 years. I speculate the plastic got brittle or perhaps I’m a bit too forceful when seeking and destroying. The implement shattered and I must needs purchase another.
huxley, I think I’ve gone through three or four of them in the last couple of years. It’s easiest to kill the fly when it’s resting on something but you still have to be quick, so after 60 or 70 light whacks against my kitchen cabinets and bookcases the things inevitably stop working (probably as the wires get loose).
They also tend to break the little panel over the battery if you drop them, so you have to make sure to use the wrist lanyard.
Bryan. I usually swing parallel to the surface. That’s to avoid impact. When we have fruit flies, I’ll leave out a small bowl of some bait–cider, for example. Then come down on it, almost touching, which causes the critters to fly up into the mesh.
Or I’ll sweep horizontally across the counter space just to see what I can get.
I hope nobody who thinks I’m a mature adult reads this.
We might have to have a separate post dedicated to the use of these fly zappers. It sounds like a rather evolved subject. 🙂
What mystifies me is these little gnats that turn up dead in my freezer. Why they want to get in there so badly puzzles me, quite aside from the question of how they seem to do it. Or are they coming from somewhere else in the frame of the refrigerator? I don’t believe in spontaneous generation. Could it be the shrimp?
Phillip Sells:
They are Sea Monkeys, much harder to swat. 🙂
My Favorite Fly Swatter.
https://www.bugasalt.com
Fly Swatter.
– the only think fast enough to nail them.
– I prefer the leather fancy model at Amazon.
You can catch a fly alive
in your hand and release it outside. Come at the fly from the front with an open palm. Your swiping motion should be slightly upward to catch it rising on its takeoff.
Jahaziel:
I own that wonderful leather flyswatter from Amazon. These recent flies were the fastest I’ve ever seen, way too fast for me to use it successfully.
I recall reading in a karate book (I think it was Mas Oyama’s “What is Karate?” (1966)) about a crazy karate master who trained to catch files with chopsticks by starting with bees tethered with thread to a thumb tack.
This notion later appeared in “The Karate Kid.”
Kids, feel free to try this at home … if you’ve got a decade or two to spare.
Neo, I’ve hit flies in mid air with my palm technique, although not even I can generate enough fajin to shock them without hitting a flat surface to create a shockwave first.
Kids, feel free to try this at home … if you’ve got a decade or two to spare.
The trick is to use sound and connect the chopsticks magnetically to the fly. Sorta like how people go into a trance when shooting or archery, and hitting targets they can’t even see sometimes.
It’s really more like a magic trick and mental focus method, than a physical speed test.
As for me, I’ve touched flying buggers with a chopstick, but snapping them into place wasn’t something I needed to do.
My nemesis is those vampire mosquitoes that see my uv light. I can now feel where they are, so I slam a hammer hand on them.
Sorta like how people go into a trance when shooting or archery, and hitting targets they can’t even see sometimes. — Ymarsakar
Ah yes, the Zen archer story. It was from a famous book, “Zen and the Art of Archery” by Eugene Herrigel, which became a cornerstone of the great Zen myth in the West. The notion is that a properly enlightened person can shoot arrows perfectly without aiming, even in the dark. I’ve run into annoying poets who claimed that was how they wrote as poets.
However, the Herrigel story has been debunked by a fastidious Japanese researcher, Yamada Shoji:
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Briefly, Yamada showed that Herrigel’s lack of Japanese fluency and his ignorance of the Japanese kyudo or “way of archery” tradition meant that his account was largely fabricated. Herrigel made significant alterations after his return from Japan to Germany in 1929, which include some of the most widely quoted material in the most widely circulated version of his hook (the earliest version is in German and dates from 1948.
Since these alterations took Herrigel even further from anything resembling historical accuracy. Yamada concluded that his account was effectively mythical. To be sure, Herrigel’s short but immensely readable volume was quite influential in the creation of the late twentieth-century mythology of Zen.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/667210
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It’s not quite as bad as Carlos Castaneda. Herrigel really did study with a Japanese archer, but (1) the archer did not teach Zen and had never been a Zen student, (2) the archer was an eccentric who was trying to start a religion based on archery, (3) Herrigel barely understood Japanese, (4) the interpreter was hit and miss and sometimes absent, (5) Herrigel filled in the blanks rather liberally according to his own ideas.
The core story, which made the book, of the archer shooting twice blindly into the dark at a target with the first arrow hitting the target and the second splitting the first arrow was a coincidence, which the archer confided to associates later.
And by the way, Herrigel went back to Germany to become an enthusiastic Nazi, a conveniently forgotten fact behind the book.
Occam’s Razor or another myth bites the dust.
Is no one going to comment on the most interesting part of the story ?
The hard part isn’t catching the fly with chopsticks, the hard part is tethering the bee to the thumbtack.
The hard part isn’t catching the fly with chopsticks, the hard part is tethering the bee to the thumbtack.
richf: I thought about it, but the bee-tether still seemed an easier shot. I can imagine with much practice holding a bee firmly but gently, then placing a thread noose around its little head.
But I wouldn’t want either job.
I’ve learned not to believe everything from the Mysterious East, but those old-school karate cats were stone fanatics.
Here’s Mas Oyama, the author of the book I mentioned earlier and founder of the school of karate (Kyokushin) I studied, killing a bull with his bare hands.
–“Mas Oyama vs Bull”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brHuxeV029E
Hux, my knowledge does not come from reading zen or stories about archers.
So no, it was not from a famous book.