The battle against flies is
constant, but there are ways to reduce the numbers of these
costly pests—without pesticides and toxic chemicals. Fly control
tactics have changed a lot in the past several decades. After
the advent of pesticides, the emphasis was on spraying the
premises or use of chemicals on the animals themselves (pour-ons,
back rubbers, insecticide ear tags, etc.) but now we realize
that some flies are developing resistance to these chemicals,
and we’ve also become more concerned with the environment. Use
of pesticides can be harmful to beneficial insects as well as
the ones we are trying to control.
Controlling Flies That Breed In Manure And Organic Matter
In livestock operations, one of the biggest problems is
filth flies that breed in rotting organic matter such as old
bedding/manure, wasted hay, etc. Bill Clymer, PhD (entomologist
at Amarillo, Texas and Senior Consultant for Spalding
Laboratories designing fly control programs) says that the
predominant fly in any geographic region is the house fly, and
the second biggest pest is the stable fly. The latter is about
the size of a house fly but a very aggressive biter, usually
feeding on the legs and lower parts of the body. Cattle being
attacked by large numbers of stable flies are restless and don’t
eat well, often grouping together tightly to try to avoid these
flies.“Stable flies don’t
breed in straight cow manure like they will in horse manure.
They prefer any kind of decaying matter that’s high in plant
waste such as wet hay or old bedding. Texas A&M did a study 2
years ago and found that if you don’t clean up the areas where
you feed big bales in feeders, this makes ideal breeding ground
for stable flies,” says Clymer. The researchers estimated that
the area around one big round feeder would produce more than a
million stable flies.
“On my own operation we unroll
big round bales in the pasture, but in the corral we put the
bales in feeders. In the spring, one of the first things we do
when it starts warming up is move the feeders and spread out the
wasted hay with a front end loader, so it will dry out—or put it
in a big pile so it will start heating. Otherwise this material
will stay wet almost all summer and continually provide bedding
sites for stable flies,” he says. You want it to dry out or heat
it up. Properly composting material becomes too hot for the
flies.
Hay and old round bales left on
the ground are major sources of flies. Clymer’s favorite piece
of advice for controlling these flies is to follow 3 rules:
sanitation, sanitation and sanitation. “If you do any one of
these 3 things, you won’t have nearly as many flies,” he quips.
Sometimes, however, no matter how
well you clean up your farm, stable flies come in from
neighboring areas. He recalls a place in southeastern Colorado
that was having a serious problem. “It was the cleanest place
I’d ever seen, regarding manure management, but on the southwest
corner the stable flies were terrible. I couldn’t find any
breeding sites on the property so I started driving toward the
southwest—the direction of prevailing winds,” he says.
About a mile away he saw a pole
barn where alfalfa hay had been stored. “The hay had been taken
out and all that was left was a thick mat of alfalfa leaves. A
blowing rain earlier that season got that material wet. I dug
into it with the toe of my boot and saw hundreds of stable fly
larvae. We cleaned out that barn with a front end loader and
scattered the litter around on the ground where it could dry,
and within a day had eliminated the stable fly problem,” says
Clymer.
You need to find the source of
fly breeding and deal with it, if possible. Clean-up in the
spring, and using a biological control like predator wasps can
keep the fly population from building up by summer. The tiny
parasitic wasps are sold commercially, and lay their eggs in
manure and rotting organic material. Their hatching larvae feed
on fly larvae and pupae in the manure. The wasps can be ordered
from several different companies, and put out early in the fly
season before the fly population becomes large, with more wasps
put out periodically through the summer.
“If you can keep flies from
getting ahead of you in the spring, you may not have to do as
much to control them during the hottest part of summer,”
explains Clymer. Heat and drying make it harder for fly larvae
to survive. But if you get a big rain, this makes conditions
more ideal again for awhile; about 10 days after the rain you
will see a tremendous increase in emergence of house flies and
stable flies.
“Most of my consulting clients,
when I worked in feedlot areas (as a consultant for Fort Dodge),
initiated a program where they tried to get rid of all breeding
sites such as wet spots from leaking water troughs, and were
cleaning the pens whenever there were not enough animals to keep
them trampled (picking up the manure at least once a week),
since under optimum conditions the flies will be breeding and
hatching in 7 to 10 days,” says Clymer. Most of the feed yards
also started using parasitic wasps to help control fly
development.
“I’ve had the best results in fly control by using sanitation
coupled with parasitic wasps. This won’t have any effect on deer
flies or horse flies (since they don’t breed in manure) but can
greatly reduce the numbers of house flies and stable flies,” he
says.
Another biological control is use
of Muscovy ducks—a breed of meat duck that spends its time on
land (rather than water) eating insects. Some small farmers
claim that 4 or 5 ducks per cow virtually eliminates a fly
problem. According to Dennis French, DVM (Louisiana State
University), in research trials, Muscovy ducks removed adult
house flies 30 times faster than fly traps, fly paper rolls or
bait cards. Ducks in cages with 100 flies took only 0.6 hours to
remove 90 percent of the flies compared to 15.3 hours for the
most effective commercial bait devices. “In other studies, the
ducks lived for 12 weeks in pens with calves, without injury or
any additional feed for the ducks. They ate about 25 house flies
per 15 minute observation period when fly populations were low
to moderate,” says French.
Biological control of horn flies
(that breed in fresh cattle manure) includes use of dung
beetles. These beetles live in fresh manure and carry it away in
small brood balls or tunnel underneath the manure pat and bury
it. The beetles’ developing larvae consume the manure. Activity
of the beetles disrupts the manure enough to eliminate or retard
the development of fly larvae by about 90 percent. Native dung
beetles are helpful (if they are not killed off by insecticides
or deworming products that end up in the manure) but are not as
efficient as some of the larger species that have been imported
from Africa.
Fly Traps
There are a number of fly traps available today, and new ones
being developed. Various types of traps have been created for
different types of flies. Greg Johnson, entomologist at Montana
State University, says that years ago he used panel traps for
stable flies. “You can catch a lot of them with one of these
traps—made with flexible plastic and a sticky covering on each
of the panels. Sunlight is reflected off the panels and it
attracts the flies,” he says.
Clymer says these traps were developed in Florida, looking at
the type of light that attracts stable flies. “Researchers used
white plastic panels around the perimeter of a property, to
catch flies that are migrating in from somewhere else. You don’t
get all of them, but in the Florida study they got several
hundred flies per day in these individual traps,” says Clymer.
Don’t put any kind of fly trap that uses an odor or bait
attractant by your back door. “The traps attract flies and some
of the flies may go right into the house when the door is open,”
says Clymer. You want the trap a ways from the house so the
attracting odor will draw them away from your door and to the
trap.
By contrast, a simple home-made
fly trap using a tray or pan of water with a little dish-washing
detergent added can be placed anywhere. A white or light colored
tray or pan works best since the flies seem to come to it
better. Any insects that land in it are drowned because the soap
breaks the surface tension on the water and they immediately
sink.
Dr. French says there are some relatively new horse fly/deer fly
traps that are quite simple in design. “One is a black ball that
attracts the flies. They go up underneath a canopy to get to it,
and when they decide this isn’t where they want to be they fly
straight up and into a jar that captures them. A couple of my
clients use these traps and report that they work quit well,”
says French.
Another type of fly catcher,
marketed by Bayer, is called Quikbayt, he says. “The active
ingredient is imidicloprid. This is one of the better bait
systems I’ve seen. Flies are attracted to it and caught. This
system is used by some of the dairies; they put a thin layer of
the bait material on a pie tin, and place the tins in several
places in the barn and it reduces the fly population a lot. I
think this system is more effective than sticky strips and stink
bombs,” says French.
Devices that kill flies on
contact (such as the fly electrocuters) kill some flies, but not
all types. Lee Townsend, PhD, Extension Entomologist at
University of Kentucky, says that house flies will go to these,
but stable flies and horse flies typically do not. “Some of the
mosquito magnets produce warmth and carbon dioxide and are
attractive to a number of biting flies, but it’s hard to say how
what percent of the fly population they kill,” he says.
“In large open areas without many sources of blood meals for
mosquitoes and blood sucking flies, a trap might be more useful
than in an area where there’s vegetation or buildings and a lot
of competition for the flies’ attention, or other things that
would block out what’s attractive about these traps. We’ve used
some of these traps for mosquito studies and we do get other
insects and flies caught in them, but you shouldn’t rely on
these to solve a fly problem,” says Townsend.
One of the most effective ways to
control biting flies (especially horse flies and deer flies) is
the Epps Biting Fly Trap™, invented by a cattleman in Oklahoma,
Alan Epps. Epps runs 250 cattle and came up with this novel trap
after being frustrated by the failure of other methods to
control biting flies, especially horse flies. In summer his
steers were covered with flies, dripping blood from the bites,
and developed big welts all over their bodies. He’d tried common
methods of fly control, including insecticides on the cattle,
but nothing worked very well or for very long. It’s especially
difficult to control horse flies and deer flies because they
breed in wet areas (where you can’t use pesticides because of
concern for the environment) and their breeding sites may be
miles away from your farm or ranch.
Epps’ trap is now made and
marketed by Mark and Virginia Bonacquista (Horseline Products),
a young farming couple in Henderson, Tennessee. “This is not a
new product. It’s been out since 1999, but it’s new to us,” says
Mark Bonacquista. Farnam was selling it before they took it
over.
“Epps tinkered with different
things ideas for 3 years and researched the natural habits of
biting flies,” explains Bonacquista. Flies are attracted to the
shape and silhouette of an animal, so Epps made a framework of
wood to attract them. The frame has a large contrasting surface
area, utilizing a dark portion and transparent panels to
simulate air space above an animal and under its belly—the areas
flies normally circle before landing on the animal to bite. When
flies hit the transparent sheets they ricochet into trays of
water below, and drown. Each tray holds 3.5 gallons of water.
In 1998 Epps presented the idea
to Farnam. That company manufactured it until 2007 when they
were bought out by Central Life Science, and closed their farm
division. Every product in the farm division was discontinued,
including the fly trap.
“We’d been using their fly trap 5
years with great success, and called to order more of the clear
plastic sheets—the only things we’d ever had to replace on the
traps. We loved those traps; we’d found out about them through
our veterinarian. We’d come to the same point of frustration
after using sprays, fly collars, rub-ons and feed throughs.
Nothing seemed to work, especially for 2 of our horses. They
were running through thickets and brush, cutting themselves up
trying to get the flies off,” he says.
“When I called to order more
sheets and found they were no longer available, we contacted Mr.
Epps and signed a contract with him to manufacture the product
ourselves and distribute it worldwide,” says Bonacquista. He and
his wife took over the product last year and 2008 is their first
full fly season, selling the traps.
“On our website we have a video
that explains and shows it working. Farnam’s entomologists
claimed it would kill all the flies on 40 acres, but I’m not
confident enough to make a statement that bold. It will
definitely clear all biting flies from 20 acres, however,” he
says. Biting flies (horse flies, deer flies, stable flies, black
flies, mosquitoes, etc.) are attracted to large dark objects.
“If you have a black horse and a light horse, or a black cow and
a light colored cow, flies are more attracted to the dark one.
They tend to fly around the animal 2 or 3 times before landing.
The 2 plastic sheets are on a 45 degree angle with the trap,” he
explains. The flies run into these sheets, thinking they’re
flying over the animal or around its legs.
“They hit the clear sheets, fall
into the water, and drown. You add 8 drops of dishwashing soap
to each tray, and the soap breaks the surface tension of the
water so insects can’t float on it; they are immediately wetted
completely. They sink and drown quicker.” They can’t float, swim
or climb out.
“When we starting using our trap,
within less than a month we’d reduced our fly problem. Research
showed that a trap kills on average about one pound of biting
flies every day,” says Bonacquista. The actual amount depends on
the fly population.
“Each year, our fly population is
less. Now we’re only getting a pound of flies every week. When
you start killing half a million biting flies, it starts to make
a dent in the population because they can’t reproduce as
quickly.”
A research project at Cornell
University and University of Florida will publish results in
April. “One of the researchers told me our trap was 10 to 1
compared to any other trap they tried. They tested it for 3
years in upstate New York on dairy farms, looking at a
non-chemical approach versus use of pesticides,” he says. The
problem with pesticides is that they only work short term and
some insects are developing resistance.
Fly predator wasps help control
house flies and stable flies that lay eggs in manure, old hay or
bedding. But they have no effect on horse flies and deer flies.
The fly trap is more universal since it kills all biting flies.
“Alan Epps created this trap to
trick them. It’s black and produces a silhouette and gives off
heat. It catches a lot of flies in the evening when the dark
portion is still warm,” says Bonacquista. When air temperature
cools, the black fly trap is warmer, and the fly thinks it’s an
animal. The fly can still see the light part, so that’s where it
flies. You can hear flies hitting the sheets—ping, ping,
ping—and falling into the water traps.
The trap costs $295. “This is a
one-time investment. I’ve talked with people who’ve had their
traps since 1999 and they still work well. You just need to
replace the clear plastic sheets every 1 to 3 years because they
deteriorate, but those sheets only cost $8,” he says. This is
inexpensive, compared with what you’d spend for sprays,
repellents and wipe-on products for horses, or chemicals to
treat all your cattle. Customers in regions with a long fly
season might need to replace the sheets every year, whereas in
other areas the sheets might last for 3 years. Bonacquista
replaces his every 2 years.
The trap works best in an open
area where flies can see it from a distance. When set up, it’s
about 5 feet tall and 7 feet long. All you have to do is scoop
out dead flies every other day or so with an aquarium net, add
more water and soap if needed, and change the water about every
2 weeks. There’s no messy bait to handle, and it doesn’t matter
what kind of dish soap you use. If the trap is in a pasture or
barnyard, you can put an electric wire around it so animals
won’t rub or damage it. “We have ours set about 12 feet outside
the pasture so the horses won’t bother it,” he says.
Many people haven’t heard about
the trap even though it’s been on the market since 1999. “Farnam
never promoted it much. They probably preferred to sell sprays,
wipes, etc. because there was more money in selling those
continually rather than a fly trap once,” says Bonacquista.
For more information, check the website:
www.horselineproducts.com or call 800-208-4846. |
