The How to Get Rid of Things Blog

While I was writing this article, I came to wondering why black flies are called black flies, and why such a fly that is native to regions populated mostly by white people is named such a thing when almost every fly you ever see is black! It got me to thinking about Michael Moore’s film, Bowling for Columbine, and that small part where he talks about fear and the somewhat dubious names given to invasive or pestiferous species of insects–the Africanized honeybee for instance.

Anyway. That’s not why I’m writing to you today. Today I’m here to tell you that I’ve finally finished up the series about flies, ending with and article about getting rid of black flies. It took me a very long time to organize this particular article because it’s not easy to get rid of black flies. It’s very difficult, in fact, and a lot of local governments are spending a lot of tax money dumping BTis (a biological larvicide) into lakes and rivers. Why? Because black flies are terrible little beasties. They’ll scurry up your pant legs and bite you in places I can’t mention here. They’ll even ignore bug repellent altogether, if they’re hungry enough. If enough of them swarm you, and you’re allergic to other bug bites, you may end up breathing one in, causing your bronchial tubes to become irritated, and they close up on you, and then the next thing you know you’re in the emergency room because you fainted during an anaphylactic episode–and, and, and! This is just a hypothetical situation, but it’s a very real one.

And that’s why white people up north are so scared of black flies.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 2:17 am and is filed under Pests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.