Insects

If you want to keep flies away without reaching for a spray, the trick is to stop giving them a reason to be there. The methods that actually work are the unglamorous ones: take away their food and breeding sites, keep them out with screens and a fan, and lean on a few herbs only […]

If flies have taken over your patio, the fix is not a can of spray, it is detective work close to home. Flies on the patio are almost always breeding within a few hundred feet of where you sit, in the trash cans, the dog run, a compost pile, or the neighbor’s setup, so the

If house flies keep showing up no matter how many you swat, the real problem is not the flies in the air; it is whatever they are breeding in. House flies are a sanitation problem wearing wings. They lay eggs in moist, rotting organic matter, like a full trash can, pet waste in the yard,

An electric fly swatter is genuinely handy for the one fly buzzing your kitchen, and an indoor light zapper earns a spot in a garage or porch, but neither one solves a fly problem. The short answer: kill the occasional fly with a swatter, keep any light zapper indoors and away from where you eat,

A fly spray drops the flies it hits on contact, and that is about all it does. It leaves no lasting barrier flies care about, and it does nothing about the maggots breeding in the trash, the drain, or the pet waste nearby. So the short answer is that a spray is for knocking down

A fly trap is worth owning, but it is half the answer at best. A trap catches the adult flies already in or around your home, and it will never keep up on its own, because one female lays hundreds of eggs in nearby filth and a whole new batch hatches in about a week.

If you want to keep carpet beetles out, you have to think about what their larvae eat, because the adults you see on the windowsill are not the problem. Preventing carpet beetles, and the clothes moths that share their menu, comes down to denying the larvae their two favorite things: a quiet undisturbed spot and