Fly Season Is Here, Is Your Barn Ready?

If you’re putting fly traps in your barn, stop!  You are making your fly problem worse!

Along with the longer days and the beautiful weather that Spring and Summer bring to Chatsworth, stable flies and house flies also settle in to spend some “quality time” with our horses. 

According to the University of California Integrated Pest Management Program the three basic flies that we encounter in Chatsworth during the warmer months are house flies, stable flies (also called “biting flies”) and garbage flies. 

By spending a little time understanding the different types of flies and some tips on managing them, you can get a handle on these annoying pests.

Both house flies and garbage flies are capable of transmitting disease and illness to humans.  Because they feed on animal waste, garbage, and food they carry bacteria and viruses that can cause dysentery, food poisoning, cholera, diarrhea, and eye infections. 

One of the scarier thoughts during the recent EHV-1 outbreak was that flies carry flu virus which could make containing an outbreak during the warmer months very difficult.  Recent studies have proven that flies are also responsible for the spread of sarcoid tumors in cattle and horses. 

Jeremy Kemp-Symonds, MRCVS, a PhD student at the Animal Health Trust in Newmarket, England, presented study results during the clinical research sessions at the 46th Congress of the British Equine Veterinary Association, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, Sept. 12-15, 2007.

 “When you look at the habits of flies, they tend not to fly great distances to go from one meal to another. About 3 km is as far as they go. So it's easy to fly from a sarcoid-infected horse to a horse with open wounds. Any fly potentially could do it.” he concluded.

If you see your horse stomping his feet, most likely he is being bitten by stable flies.  These flies feed on blood of large animals, as well as dogs where they typically feed around the periphery of the ears.  Stable flies, or biting flies, are not known to be significant carriers of disease.

Nowadays there are many products on the market to help alleviate your fly problem.  UCIPM advises that the best way to manage the fly population is to eliminate developmental sites such as manure, wet shavings in stalls, and uncovered garbage for house flies. 

To manage stable flies, eliminate piles of wet grass clippings, wet hay, and make sure that compost piles are maintained properly.

If you walk into any feed store and look for fly control products, you’ll see fly traps with fly sex attractant and many spray on pesticides.  Because flies develop resistance to pesticides very quickly, most of the spray-on products are not very effective.  Fly spray should be used every other day, with a higher concentration on the horse’s lower legs.

Using fly traps appropriately can be beneficial, but it’s important to place them in the correct locations.  By using the wrong products in the wrong places, you could be making your fly problem even worse. 

For example, fly traps such as the “Trap N Toss” found at Kahoot’s on Mason Avenue in Chatsworth should never be used near the barn or house.  These traps are meant to lure flies away from you and your animals by using a fly sex attractant that gets the flies to enter a plastic jar that they can’t escape from.  You typically see them hanging in nearly every stall at local barns; no wonder the flies have been so bad the past couple of years!  Sticky traps or fly paper are best used near doors and in the barns or corrals to trap house flies. 

For biting flies, you’ll need a different type of trap.  The Spalding Company has a product called “The Bite Free” Stable Fly trap that was tested by the USDA and proven to be the most effective trap on the market.  Most stores don’t carry the trap, but it can be purchased online on their website at bxzjt.spalding-labs.com. 

According to the experts at UC Davis on the UCIPM website, “Almost all nuisance fly species are best controlled by eliminating larval developmental sites and reducing adult attractants in the vicinity of buildings or other areas of concern.” 

Because of this, those fancy fly control systems can help alleviate the adult fly population, but do little to stop the problem since they don’t address larval development sites such as manure and wet shavings. 

In a nutshell, keep things clean, get the right traps in the right places, and enjoy a fly-free summer.