“It’s mango season,” nods Wayan Manis wisely, swatting house flies off the counter. The parrot snaps at them as they zoom past his perch. The dachshund chases flies lazily around the kitchen floor before collapsing under the table. Suddenly there are flies everywhere. Scientists have calculated that, under optimal conditions, a pair of flies may be progenitors of about a zillion offspring in five months. At certain times of the year many of them hold reunions at my house.
The Balinese say the flies come out in mango season, but it was late in June when I first moved into my new house. In almost daily visits for the 14 weeks it took to build the house, I’d hardly seen a single house fly on the property. The day I took up residence, it was clear that several thousand flies had suddenly decided to join me.
Wayan soon tracked the infestation to its source -- our temple was holding a week-long ceremony with frequent sacrifices of chickens, ducks and pigs just a hundred metres away. Horrified, we watched the flies land in legions on the new terracotta floor, which they seemed to find particularly attractive.
Musca domestica, or the common house fly, breeds with gay abandon. Each female fly can lay approximately 500 eggs in several batches during her lifetime and is receptive to mating only 36 hours after emerging from the pupa. Now, that’s precocious. The average lifespan of an adult house fly is approximately 15 to 25 days, long enough to generate up to 20 generations a year in the tropics and annoy me considerably.
It is Not Nice to have flies, so it was reassuring to visit a friend at her elegant villa and find the lunch table ablaze with candles to deter the dozens of hovering house flies. So it wasn’t just me…
But flies are not only Not Nice, they are known to carry over 100 diseases including typhoid, cholera, Salmonella, bacillary dysentery, tuberculosis and anthrax. Short of blasting the immediate environment with toxic chemicals, what was an environmentally responsible householder to do? Swabbing the counters with bleach discouraged them from landing, but they would just circle infuriatingly instead. A trip to the supermarket revealed that the least polluting option was good old-fashioned flypaper. The local product’s label claimed to catch everything from flies to elephants, so I bought 10 packets.
Lem Lalat is an A4 sized sheet of brown paper, liberally smeared on one side with rubber cement and folded in half. There was a trick to pulling it apart without glue adhering stubbornly to your hands, sarong or the nearest countertop. But once we started laying them around the house the results were impressive. One fly would land, stick and begin to buzz furiously. Then his friends would arrive, hover around and touch down to see what the fuss was about. By the end of the day I estimated that we had caught at least 500 flies. This went on for a couple of weeks, after which fly season seemed to be over and the daily catch dropped to almost nothing.
But the sticky paper was catching more than flies. The first casualty was Microduck, a minute duckling I’d brought from my other house. A stiff breeze blew the flypaper into her pen, where she had gotten a little too close to the buzzing payload. A hysterical string of high-pitched quacks brought us all running to the pen, where Microduck was becoming more intimately adhered to the flypaper with every flap. It took some time to extricate her, during which operation she lost most of the feathers from one side. “Bird hair gone,” noted Wayan Manis.
Wayan herself was the next victim. Passing the kitchen counter, her long hair touched an open flypaper which attached itself firmly to her tresses. That’s when we discovered that cooking oil helps loosen the demon grip of industrial strength rubber cement. It was a long and messy business but we managed to eventually free her without resorting to scissors. She started wearing her hair up after that.
Kalypso is an elegant Kintamani dog with a silky black coat and a tail like a fox brush. When that magnificent tail swept up a sheet of flypaper from the terrace one day, it was her dignity that suffered. We dared not laugh as she turned to view the appendage with more disgust than alarm. Quite a lot of cooking oil and a bath restored her poise, but she took a long detour around flypaper after that. Then Daisy the dachshund -- bouncy, fearless and remorselessly curious -- managed to sit on a piece of fly paper that had blown to the floor…
Luckier was the cicak who was similarly lured by what seemed like a free lunch. The little creature was found glued flat to the paper from the tip of its nose to its tail. It took me several minutes to free it with a Q-tip and teaspoon of cooking oil. (There’s a technique to this, freeing the body first and then working gently down the limbs and under the fragile little toes, and liberating the head last. I’ve had cause to perfect this procedure over the years and have even applied it to a large and furious tokay.)
The lizard escaped undamaged with tail intact, though gleaming with oil. I wondered whether it would be able to walk on walls after its misadventure, or slip off onto the head of an unsuspecting dinner guest until it got its traction back.
All this drama, because it’s fly season.
Late each afternoon the flies disappear, just about the time the mosquitoes emerge for their shift. Where do they go at night, all these hundreds of flies? Are there little bars where they perch on tiny stools over drops of beer—House Flies by day, Bar Flies by night?
