At first I thought it was just us.

Then we heard the neighbors are also dealing with it.

Then it turns out that the village of Cuneges is having an issue.

Then the we hear from neighbors the next city over that we (Cuneges) are in the rumor mill.

Flies. A whole lot of flies.
Would you like flies with that?

The war is escalating.
Sticky tape works well, and you get a ribbon to take home and show mommy how well you did.

I built a dozen traps that work well enough.

I modified one of those fly zappers to output a little more voltage.

But it is just not enough.

One of my little traps I make, basically a funnel trap lid I print for some canning jars I purchased, will fill to capacity in 2 days. That’s about 400 ml or in Freedom Units, 40 packets of McDonalds ketchup.

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I pride myself on how well I have adapted to the frustrations of French Life.
Everything is closed on Sunday. I accept that.
Everything closes between 12:00 and 14:00. I accept that.
Nothing gets done in August. I accept that.

The flies are a bit much.

We live in the country. Insects happen here, as well as mice, rats, shrews, gliglis, nutria, hedgehogs. The french countryside is rife with all manner or crawling and flying things.

I am reacting en force to the fly issue.

I am building a giant “dry” trap.

Said trap, pictured here at Vasquez Rocks because someone suggested it could catch a Gorn, stands 70cm tall . For the ‘Muricans adverse to units of measure based on decimal units linked to physically observable quantities, 70cm is about 35 shrews stacked, or the length of a single nutria, snout to tail.

The trap is made of some 11 or 12 3D printed parts, designed by yours truly.

In reality, the inner cone needs to be taller to take full advantage of the height of the collection chamber, but I have designed a short inner cone for testing. If that works, I can make a taller cone to test.

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These are the other items in my arsenal.
The jam jar trap is gilled with beer and grenadine. Once the flies get in there, they ferment and the brew escalates in its attraction potential.

The “Boom Stick” with the 4.1V power supply (compared to the 3.0V power delivered by the AA batteries), that is a 24% increase in voltage.

If the battle escalates further, I will light up this little gem. It outputs 20,000 Volts. Any fly that gets into the conductive path of the electrodes and bridges the air gap will be turned to fly vapor, char, particulates and potentially a small cloud of bacteria and other nasty stuff.

This is an outdoor use case.

The plan here would be an open tray of bait, beer+grenadine with a gentle fan wafting air across the large surface area of the tray. A vertical grid of electrodes would incinerate any flies that enter. A small diameter filter grid would keep bees out.