Summer has to be among the best times of the year. The hard bite of winter is a distant memory and the allergy-inducing pollens of spring have run its course.
Instead, you can look forward to lots of sunshine, lazy tanning sessions in your backyard, and wonderful dips in the pool.
Unfortunately, it’s not just humans that come out to frolick during summertime. It’s also the season to say hello again to flies, mosquitoes, and other winged monstrosities that are sure to put a damper on your mood (and probably make your skin look like a polka dot canvas with their bites).
There are already a lot of life-hacks that deal with mosquitoes but for this article, we’re going to focus on flies.
Flies can be pretty persistent buggers. Fly swatters, fly sprays, fly traps, battery-operated fly zappers. There are all sorts of devices and chemicals designed to keep those flies away but give often mixed results.
But luckily, there’s a simple homemade device that’s not only cheap but also environmentally-friendly. Best of all, you probably have most, if not all, the materials lying around your home already. It’s easy to make and doesn’t consume any electricity.
All you’ll need are:
- A freezer bag (the heavy-duty type)
- Ordinary table salt
- Lime juice
- A couple of coins
- Water
Simply mix all materials into the freezer bag, zip it up securely, then hang it high up your door or any other area where you want to shoo away any flies. As simple as that, you already have an all-natural anti-fly device.
For best results, place the bag where there is a lot of light. This would be areas where the sun’s rays would normally hit and/or areas where there are overhead lights nearby.
So what manner of sorcery is this? Why would water and some random materials keep flies away?
We can find the answer in biology. Specifically, in the structure of a fly’s eyes.
If we use the common house fly as an example, its eyes have anywhere between 3,000-6,000 lenses giving them a mosaic view of the world around them.
Because of the way the eyes are structured, they cannot handle light refraction with the same ease as humans can.
The bag filled with water and coins reflect light in a certain way that is uncomfortable for the fly and forces it to move away in order to avoid it. This is why the water bag requires a light source to make it work.
That’s the theory behind the device. Will it actually work? There’s only one way to find out and that’s by making one of your own!
Video Credit: Cornelia Sue Riehl