The other day I was cruising around the interwebs, just looking for anything interesting, and came across a post from Britain. A woman was posting about taking a plastic bag, throwing in a few shiny pennies, half filled the bag with water and hung it up.
Why would you want half a bag of water hanging in your house? To keep the flies out, of course. The idea behind this is that the shiny pennies reflect and/ or refract light at a frequency that makes the whole house look like water to the compound eyes of the fly and it will stay away because it doesn’t like water. Or something like that.
I have no idea if this works, but it did remind me of the fly bag.
Growing up around here, I had never heard of a fly bag. However I spent a few years living in Newfoundland. The fly bag is a big deal to many people in Newfoundland, and they swear by it. What’s a fly bag?
You take a paper bag, sort of inflate it… basically, make it sort of roundish, tie a string on it and hang it in a doorway. It keeps flies out of the house. If you are wondering how a paper bag would keep flies out of the house, the idea behind it is that to a fly, a paper bag hanging in an open space looks like a wasp nest. Regular flies don’t like wasps, so they stay away. Other wasps don’t want to fight a nest full of wasps so they stay away. The fake wasp nest… a regular paper bag… supposedly will keep the flies out of your house.
I have never conducted any serious studies of these two types of hanging anti-fly devices. I have used a fly bag. It seemed to work. Then again, I also had a screen door, so that was keeping out many of the flies to begin with.
So I can’t actually recommend either one and tell you for sure it works. But some people will swear by these methods. And you may see a paper bag hanging in my doorway.
