Brief Information

Housefly is present in all populated parts of the world, but prefers to adopt with warm areas. Housefly is largely associated with humans and accompany them daily around the globe, whenever they go (house, workplace, relaxing and comfort places), causing a lot of disturbances.
Housefly is a nuisance insect that feeds on any food we eat plus different food wastes, and thus can easily carry various diseases to humans and pet animals and damage the public health.

Features

Features
Housefly has a spongy mouth-part, brown aristate antennae, blackish-brown legs and faded gray wings of a yellowish base.
Male houseflies are usually 5.8 to 6.5 mm and feature a pair of large compound eyes that almost touch, with 4 dark longitudinal lines of equal length stretching to the rear end of the Scutum. The abdomen is yellow and has a centered black line.
The females tend to be larger than males (6.5-7.5 mm), and have a pair of large compound eyes, but are more widely separated. The females have the same 4 dark longitudinal lines as the males. The abdomen is silver gray with some sided dark ribbons.
Notice that
The little house fly (Fannia Canicularis) appears similar to the ordinary housefly, but much darker. It has 3 brown lines on the pronotum. It is observed frequently flying inside the room back and forth.

The Behavior

Houseflies are attracted to decomposing and fermenting organic materials, where they breed in the garbage, animals and birds dung, fruit and vegetables waste. They highly prefer horse dung for a short time because of its speed decomposition. Houseflies usually do not breed in human feces, except some that live near open toilets in some hot regions, for example, Fannia scalaris. If the food is not available, houseflies fly randomly. Once they find their preferred food, they fly toward it spirally or circularly. They recognize their food by the sense of smell, and taste it by sensory organs spreading over the mouth and legs, as moisture also plays a role here. Food containing sugar or starch, noticeably, becomes more appealing to flies, especially, when other flies previously fed on it. Houseflies can fly well in a speed of 6-8 K/H, so it is easy to fly long distances, but they prefer to exist near the place where they were born, within a radius of 100-500 M, and their spread does not exceed 1-3 K. However, building houses next to each other may give a good opportunity for houseflies to spread over long distances through a series of short-range flights. Density of houseflies differs from one region to another, throughout the year, according to climate and the appropriateness of the breeding environment. In most regions with a temperate climate, like Egypt, the number of houseflies increases in the spring and during the summer months till the beginning of autumn, then decreases with the beginning of winter.

Life Cycle

Female lies its egg in lumps,100-150 eggs in each, on the surface layer of a decomposing organic environment with appropriate humidity and temperature. An egg is white and elongated in shape, with 1mm long. It has two lower seams between them, which is the one from which the egg splits after 8-24 to release the larva. Larva is white and soft, consisting of 13 rings, with no legs, having a pointed front end that holds a pair of mouth hooks. The larva back end is circular and bears the posterior pair of respiratory stomata. Larva prefers 35 c temperature, needs a high humidity and strongly avoids the light, and cannot tolerate temperature higher than 45 c, so it lives near the surface of the breeding environment as far as 10-15 CM, in order to avoid high temperature emanating out of heaps of garbage and dung ferment. It feeds on bacteria, yeasts and decomposing organic materials, where it increases in size and sluffs twice till growing completely to be 12 mm within 5-14 days depending on temperature. Mature larvae stop feeding and become very active, where they move to soil layers with the least temperature and driest, or on sides of heaps of garbage, where they remain inside the skin of their last sluff which takes the form of a barrel casing about 4-5 mm long with yellowish-white during the first 1-2 hours, then gradually changes to light brown then dark brown or black within 24 hours. Chrysalis phase takes 3-5 days, and then the insect gets out by incision of the barrel casing from its upper end by stretching and contraction of the Ptilinum located between the compound eyes. Adult insects breed after two days of hatching at a temperature of about 30ºC. Vision and smell play a vital role in mating, both the male and female excrete a hormone called Muscalure associated with mating; the female starts to lay the first sack of eggs; it may need more than one week if the temperature is around15ºC, when the temperature decreases below 15ºC, it does not lay eggs. Female lies egg 3-4 times through its lifetime. Adult insects live in Summer, for several weeks and can also live longer in cold weather; and in spring, because of moderate temperature, the average of the generation period (egg – adult insect) is about ten days, meaning, i.e. the housefly may have 10-12 generations in a season.