Flies

Before you jump to conclusions, no I'm not thankful for flies! I'm thankful for ways to keep them away.

Summer in Australia = so many flies. If your outdoors you are constantly swatting at these annoying flying insects. At a training session one afternoon, one chick announces she has a solution for our fly problem. This girl is from South Africa and this is something her grandparents showed her to keep them away. The idea is you get pieces of alfoil and put them in a clear bottle of water and put that bottle in the sun.

The thought behind it is that flies have so many eyes facing in all different directions, so as the light reflects off the foil which is floating around in the water, it comes at the flies into many different directions, hitting lots of their eyes and they don't like it. To them its a big glaring disco ball...makes sense.

So after talking her idea up for over a week, she called her grandma and asked how exactly to make this bottle and it was brought to training. The first day she had it there, the wind was so high that I think there would have been no flies regardless of whether the bottle was there or not.

Second attempt - still a bit of wind but while I was sitting on the grass I was swatting, so we may as well give it another go. And you know what, while the sun was out (probably for only about the first 30 minutes) I think there were less flies. It wasn't as windy as it had been the first day we'd tried, so this could be a potential solution for our fly problem!! We'll keep you posted.