gaaaahhhhhhhccckkkkkk!!!!

SO...
 Having recently posted, Brain, about how enamored I am of my chickens, I feel it is only fair to post about some of the drawbacks and challenges of backyard chicken keeping.  Things that a lot of the other blogs dont post about.  Maybe nothing bad ever happens to those people's chickens, maybe it's just me, but sometimes things go wrong.  Like your chickens get pox (ironically not chicken pox, that's for people) or respiratory diseases or (horrors) lice.   Yep it happens, and it's happened to me.  But this post will be short as I am off to sleep afterwards and am already yawning my head off.  This short post has to do with flies and fly control.

This is my first summer with the chickens living in the backyard and I could tell immediately that the flies were going to be an issue.  I have two great, hulking dogs that follow me like shadows and a capriciously indecisive cat who also like to come and go, this necessitates a lot of standing in  doorways trying to chivy animals through without letting flies in from the outside.  Of course any attempts at fly blocking are futile and I wind up with annoying, errant flies cruising my house.  I am deadly with a fly swatter (deadly to flies that is), rarely ever missing a swipe, but flies in the house are a total gross-out and I knew something had to be done!

The first thing I did was try a series of homemade fly traps using tutorials I found online like this one
This is the model that worked the best, but it only caught a few small flies.  The big houseflies  just scoffed at it.   If there is anything worse than a plague of flies its a plague of smart-ass scoffy flies.  I had to take more drastic (meaning expensive) measures.

I bought a solar fly trap from Arbico Organics.  I really hadn't much hope of it working very well, but the flies are so annoying out by the chicken coop that I was willing to give it a shot even at $69.95.  Glad I did!  This thing works!  The video was taken after the trap had been out for twenty four hours using the bait included with the shipment.

Here's a copy of my review I wrote on Arbico's site.


Reluctantly shelled out 60 plus dollars for this trap after several attempts at making my own traps from on-line tutorials and empty soda bottles had very limited success catching any flies.  Did not have high hopes for this trap but WOW!!!  That thing works! The only reason it doesn't get five stars is that the construction and materials are a bit flimsy.  The lid is difficult to remove and replace.  You must mix the bait yourself (you need a one gallon jug with a secure lid that you dont want to use again for anything else).  The bait stinks but not terribly.  Our chicken coop is about 50 feet from our house, with the trap out there I can't smell anything from the patio, but the flies sure can!  I think I have trapped every fly in the neighborhood! You have to wait a week after you mix the bait for it to ferment.  In the meantime, the company reccomends using a beer and egg mixture as bait.  That works too but NOTHING like as well as the bait they sent that you mix up and ferment.  Wow!