Tag: flies

Blowing on Bats. For Science.
No, that’s how you find them. IT’S SCIENCE.
Time Flies
A neat project that uses flypaper, flies, and a fuel cell to power a clock! It’s based in part on the idea of a carnivorous plant. 8 dead flies = 12 days of clockworks.

No, Bounce Fabric Softener will NOT protect you from bugs
Fungus gnats and mosquitoes are not the same.
The Amityville Bug House
So, the Amityville Horror was a bad book, a crappy movie, and all around bullshit. But…some days at the Bug House, I can totally relate to the scene with the flies (video here; start at […]
Things that aren’t bees (#2)
Yesterday, I discussed a common group of flies that mimic bees and wasps. Here’s a more challenging mimic. This one is also a fly, but a pretty convincing fake bumble bee! In fact, there is […]
Things that aren’t bees (#1)
I get a lot of “what is that?!” questions, and I thought it would be fun to have a series of things that look like bees and wasps, but are not bees or wasps. There […]
Fly Balls
No, not baseball (although this was the name of my graduate school softball team). And not a reference to non-existent fly scrotums, either. It’s a description of this photo: The flies were identified on Entomo-L […]
Apostrofly
I discovered a new phenomenon this week–the apostrofly: “…the discovery of the apostrofly, first recorded in this column in the Guardian on September 30 2002. The apostrofly, as I noted at the time, is an […]
Word of the Day: Sapromyophily
It’s Thursday of National Pollinator Week, and today let’s look at some other forgotten pollinators: flies. Specifically, carrion-fly and dung-flies that pollinate plants, a process called sapromyophily. The flowers these flies pollinate produce smells mimicking […]