Deer Fly once again
This deer fly tried to bite me on June 30, 2019. When I killed her I didn’t mess her up too badly, so I decided to get some pictures of her.
I am pretty sure that this is the same species I posted back in 2012, but last time I didn’t get the pictures until after the eye colors had faded. This time, she was sufficiently recently-dead that the colors were still pretty vivid.
Her proboscis was also fully extended, so we can see the fairly chunky appendage that she intended to use to rend my flesh, and then mop up the blood with the little sponge on the end.
And, a ventral shot just for good measure, so we can see her orange-brown legs and black feet.
Given that I got the eye colors this time, I am pretty sure this is the highly-unpopular Chrysops vittatus. The larvae live in “all wet habitats” (swamps, ponds, puddles, streams, you name it) and the adults are strong fliers that can fly miles from where they grew up. And since in Michigan you are never more than six miles from a body of water, these flies turn up just about everywhere.
On the plus side, they are probably the species that is most susceptible to a tanglefoot hat. As long as I remember to wear my sticky hat, I never even notice them because they start by attacking my head. And the minute they touch the tanglefoot, that’s it for them. All I hear is a buzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZP* as they hit it and go silent.
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I take it there’s no way to clean off the hat after a season of fly-adhesion? Do you have to reapply the tanglefoot periodically, and if so, are you coating over the prior seasons’ mummified flies as a grotesque monument to their hopeful eventual demise?
I just use a plastic putty-knife to scrape off the corpses in the fall, and then store it by putting it upside-down in a 5-gallon bucket in the garage. Then it gets a new coat of tanglefoot in the spring. I’ve been using the same hard hat for some years now, it is holding up pretty well.
Yes, pictures please! I wonder how they would work on other pests.