{"id":58576,"date":"2026-09-05T16:28:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T14:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/?p=58576"},"modified":"2026-09-05T16:28:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T14:28:28","slug":"the-summer-that-never-left-and-uninvited-flies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/the-summer-that-never-left-and-uninvited-flies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Summer That Never Left and Uninvited Flies"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 2<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Recently I went out for the entire day and when I came home I had a swarm of flies sitting by the velux, two days in a row. The buzzing was loud. It&#8217;s a good thing that I am not squeamish about flies because this was the stuff of nightmares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This summer I&#8217;ve had puce de canards burrow into my legs and die causing discomfort for a few days, I&#8217;ve gone for Monday runs where midges were an issue, and recently I saw clouds of flying ants, but luckily these insects didn&#8217;t pester me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The cluster fly experience is one I wouldn&#8217;t recommend. If you can avoid it, do. According to Gemini the flies come out all of a sudden, I suspect due to the weird weather we&#8217;ve had this summer. Usually we have cycles of heat, and cold, and comfortable weather. This year we&#8217;ve had five or six heat waves and very little rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The result is that plenty of flies, ants, and other insects haven&#8217;t had their usual cycles. Even bees suffered with the heat, and lack of flowers and rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I saw the swarm by the window I thought &#8220;Did I leave something in the bin for them to feast on?&#8221;. I hit the bin. nothing flew out. That&#8217;s good, it shows that it wasn&#8217;t a mistake I made. I believe that by having the air vents for the veluxes open all summer flies were able to lay eggs, and when the temperature shifted it triggered a mass hatching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In theory the mass hatching came from the roof, and they came into my apartment. I noticed hundreds of dots by the velux so I cleaned them away, as well as by another window. My hope is that the dots were the eggs that I destroyed, and prevented from hatching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a silver lining. Because I kept the shutters closed downstairs all these flies clustered at the window, desperate to fly out through the velux. When I open the velux they fly out. This worked several times. I then had to hunt and kill the flies that had the wrong instinct. Flies that decided to stay indoors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Convention says that we should use fly swatters but I found that t-shirts, towels and other cloth work extremely well, especially when you&#8217;re dealing with plenty of flies in a space of days. The towel knocks them out, and then you hoover them up. If they wake up they&#8217;re trapped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My trap is a neoprene glove to prevent them from getting back out of the hoovers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The problem I am facing now is that I have to keep the windows to prevent a new infestation from taking place. The challenge I&#8217;m facing is that we&#8217;re in a summer without end. They forecast lower temperatures, and they forecast rain. They&#8217;re forecast into the wishful future, rather than the real future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The consequence is that I need to keep my windows closed, just when the mornings are cool but the afternoons are warm. 28\u00b0c today, and up to 31\u00b0c on Monday. This is a summer that will never end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For the first time I want summer to end, so that the minergie building cools, and so that the flies that are preventing me from opening windows die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This blog post is as a historical document commenting on the weird weather from this summer. And Finally, I suspect the fly problem is resolved. I hope it is. I&#8217;d like to aerate tomorrow or the next day, more selectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 2<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span>Recently I went out for the entire day and when I came home I had a swarm of flies sitting by the velux, two days in a row. The buzzing was loud. It&#8217;s a good thing that I am not squeamish about flies because this was the stuff of nightmares. This summer I&#8217;ve had puce [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[255],"tags":[8126,4525,4409,316,8129,1158,8128],"class_list":["post-58576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-swiss-walks","tag-flies","tag-heat","tag-heatwave","tag-summer","tag-swarm","tag-weather","tag-weirding"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58577,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58576\/revisions\/58577"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}