*All images taken with Canon 7D and Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Macro lens*

these flies should get a room

Spotted another pair of houseflies mating on the Raphidophora celatocaulis (Shingle Plant). This was taken with my Canon 7D and 100mm Macro lens. You can read more about houseflies in a previous post .

Anyway, I chanced upon a very interesting website called the Amazing Flygun Fly . It lists out everything you never really wanted to know about flies. I have reproduced some of the more interesting facts below.

1. There are 120,000 species of flies, ranging in size from 1/20th of an inch to 3 inches;

2. Flies are the only insect to have 2 wings - all others have 4;

3. After studying 300,000 flies, researchers Dr Yao and Dr Yuan of China concluded that your average house fly carries 2 million bacteria on its body
House flies' feet are 10 million times more sensitive to the taste of sugar than the human tongue;

4. House flies walk upside down using glue-oozing toe pads;

5. To land upside down on the ceiling, flies grab it with their front legs and then somersault the rest of their body over;

6. A fly beats its wings 200 times a second, 3 times faster than a hummingbird;

7. A new born bush fly can start mating when it is 3 days old;

8. The favourite colour of house flies is red, followed by orange, black, violet, green, blue, white and yellow;

9. The sex of a bush fly can be determined by the distance between its eyes ( female eyes are wider apart);

10. A fly can travel 300 times the length of its body in one second - a jet travelling at the speed of sound only travels 100 times its length
There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than human beings on the whole planet;

11. Flies can carry typhoid, cholera, diarrhoea, amoebic dysentery, T.B, anthrax, gangrene, bubonic plague, leprosy, scarlet fever and yellow fever;

12. Flies vomit on food before eating it, so as to soften the meal up - you don't need us to tell you that fly vomit swarms with bacteria;

13. Flies defecate every 4-5 minutes;

14. Flies don't bite or sting … they stab;

15. A Fly's vision is only sharp for 24-36 inches;

16. Despite having 4000 lenses in each eye, flies have bad vision, but are good at detecting movement - move slowly and they don't see you as a threat;

17. Flies jump up and backwards when taking off, so if you swipe at them from behind they will generally jump straight into your palm;

18. If a house fly spots a group of flies, he will join them;

19. The quantity and type of maggots and flies in a decomposing corpse can help a forensic entomologist estimate the time of death fairly accurately'

20. Fly maggots only eat dead flesh, so specially bred sterile ones are sometimes used medically to heal septic wounds more quickly and effectively than conventional methods. The maggots devour the infected parts and leave the healthy tissue alone.

the common housefly

I'm not the biggest fan of houseflies. In fact, I find them extremely annoying, especially when they land on your leg whilst you are gardening. That said, they do make rather interesting photography subjects, particularly in macro-photography.

The housefly (Musca domestica), is a Diptera of the Brachycera suborder. It is the most common of all domestic flies, accounting for about 90% of all flies in human habitations, and indeed one of the most widely distributed insects, found all over the world.

The adults are 8–12 mm long. Their thorax is gray, with four longitudinal dark lines on the back. The whole body is covered with hair-like projections. The females are slightly larger than the males, and have a much larger space between their red compound eyes. The mass of pupae can range from about 8 to 20 mg under different conditions.

Each fly can lay approximately 500 eggs in several batches of about 75 to 150. Within a day, larvae which is also known as maggots hatch and live and feed on organic material (such as garbage, dead animals or even feces). These maggots live for about a week before crawling into a dry cool place for its transformation into a pupae. The adults which emerge from the pupae live for about 2 weeks to a month. Females are able to mate some 36 hours after emergence from the pupae and copulation usually takes between a few seconds to a couple of minutes. Flies thrive best in warm temperatures, which explains why they are most prevalent in the tropics.

Flies may be a vector of diseases. However, and as bizarre as it sounds, the maggots are also used in medical treatment, particularly to heal open wounds which do not respond to conventional treatment. Maggot therapy (also known as maggot debridement therapy (MDT), larval therapy, larva therapy, larvae therapy, biodebridement or biosurgery) is a type of biotherapy involving the intentional introduction of live, disinfected maggots (fly larvae) into the non-healing skin and soft tissue wound(s) of a human or animal for the purposes of selectively cleaning out only the necrotic tissue within a wound (debridement), disinfection, and promotion of wound healing. You can read more about maggot therapy here .