Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
driven into a frenzy or can panic and run. Even rather tough horses may spend the entire
day stomping alternate legs, causing damaging concussion to legs, joints, and hooves and
resulting in loose shoes and loss of weight and condition.
Stable flies breed in decaying organic matter, and moist manure is a perfect medium. A
female often lays twenty batches of eggs during her 30-day life span, each batch contain-
ing between forty and eighty eggs. The eggs hatch in 21 to 25 days. When the eggs hatch,
the adult flies emerge ready to breed. (If you have seen small flies and thought they were
immature stable flies, you were probably looking at a different type of fly.) The number of
flies produced by one pair of adults and their offspring in 30 days is a staggering figure, in
the millions. That is why prevention is the best way to keep the fly population under con-
trol. It is based on removing breeding grounds, controlling moisture, and using insecticides
and other insect-control measures.
Prevent breeding.
Manure management and moisture control are two key ways to re-
move breeding grounds. Remove manure and wasted feed daily from stalls and pens, and
either spread it thinly to dry or compost it. Keep moist areas to an absolute minimum. Be
sure there is proper drainage in all facilities. Repair leaking faucets and waterers. Eliminate
wet spots in stalls and pens by clearing away bedding, adding stall freshener, and providing
adequate air circulation via natural airflow or fans to dry stall floors.
Kill larvae.
Fly predators can break the life cycle of flies. This method of biological con-
trol is safe and nontoxic and, if properly implemented, requires much less labor for a great-
er degree of control than many insecticide-based methods.
Fly predators are tiny, nocturnal, stingless wasps that lay eggs in the pupae of the com-
mon housefly, the biting stable fly, the horn fly, the lesser housefly, the garbage fly, and the
blowfly. The wasp eggs use the contents of the pupae as food, thereby killing the fly before
it can develop. The wasps stay within 200 feet of where they hatched and work while you
sleep. They are harmless to animals and people. Methods of control involving insecticides
must be carefully implemented or they will wipe out the predator population along with the
flies.
Chemical larvicides can be applied to manure piles or fed to horses. Those fed to horses
pass through the digestive system undigested and begin their work on the larvae in manure.
The distribution is unequal in the manure, however, and the larvicides have an active life
of only about a day.
Trap adults.
Baits, including sticky paper, sweet fluids, and sex attractants, can be used
in areas of heavy accumulation.
