Uninvited Guests
 

We have uninvited guests in and around the house, loads of very small flies that bite, especially around the ankles and I assume suck blood as when they get the size 9 flip-flop treatment there is quite often a bloody mark on the floor. We have had these at the beginning of the rainy season most years but this year there are loads more and have been here longer than normal.

Have tried the usual moving fruit into the fridge, spraying indoor and out door bins and the compost bin and hung up sticky pads but they are still here.

Anyone with good ideas on how to get rid of them

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

More geckoes....This is my next business venture - breeding geckoes and releasing them in a home...then picking them up later!:egyptian: Pay by the week or the month!

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

We have plenty of geckoes in and around the house but they spend most of their time near the ceiling avoiding the dogs who catch any that come within range. The geckoes must kill/eat quite a bit by the amount of detritus that is swept up in the mornings.

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

:lol:
Not geckoes, but here in SW France we have a fair number of lizards who treat our outside window-sils as their private toilet with cr*p everywhere. Drives MmeTP crazy. But fortunately they don't get inside, if they did and left an amount of detritus indoors as you mention, she'd have kittens, come out on strike and probably organise a national kill-a-lizard protest march. As most are probably aware, the French don't need much of an excuse to organise mass demonstrations..........;)

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

Geckoes like ceilings whether there are dogs or not. And, it turns out, there is some very interesting physics behind their ability to (mostly) be able to cling to ceilings, which was fascinating to me as an engineering student, back in the day.

Also back in the day, I had a girlfriend who was "green" before that was really a thing (which unfortunately dates me quite a bit). She was really against pesticides, and between us we'd rented a student apartment that, like most cheap and cheerful apartments in Canada at the time, had a lot of cockroaches (albeit tiny ones, by Pinoy standards), no matter how cleanly you kept your own unit.

So, long story short, we bought a gecko for non-chemical pest control purposes. And it actually worked pretty well, most of the time. He(?) occasionally left shedded skins around the place, but mostly lived quietly behind the fridge, and definitely did curtail cockroach incursions.

*But* he also had an uncanny ability to interrupt our most intense lovemaking sessions. Four times in four months he fell off the ceiling on top of us as we were "in flagrante delicto".

And trust me, it's only funny the first time...

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

So what are they ? Sand flies/ black flies? . If they are sucking blood seems that they are not interested in fruit .

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

The wife calls then nik nik (spelling). They are very small like what in the UK we call thunder bugs but bite and can get though a mosquito net.

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

Ah! I have a google and it suggests those are sand flies. Really horrible things. They are 'protected' on conservation land here in NZ . I have a bit of a reaction to them so I loathe them.
I can't help with this really as Stokkevn has already sprayed and I only ever found covering up and deet protected me.

All sympathy. Ugh!

This page offers some ideas.

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

They are not sand flies. We do have some that look like a 2mm long Vulcan Bomber and some even smaller that just look like miniature flies. The miniature fly is the one that I suspect, they are extremely agile and are gone even before you pick up the fly swat. Maybe the fruit interest is just somewhere for them to lay their eggs.

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

I suspect they are biting midges aka "no-see-ums" which are 1mm-3mm long. Sand flies are a larger genus in that group.

https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/pu...tingmidge.html

Re: Uninvited Guests
 

"No-See-Em" were the bane of my existence when i lived in FL.. they are too small to even see.. but carry a bitching sting.. lot worse than a mosquito bite.. if you lived anywhere near foliage (bushes/trees etc) in most of FL (not so much in Miami) .. you were bitten to death.. although not known to carry series bacterial infections (like Malaria etc).. they sting was enuff to make you cry bloody murder... there are a number of 'home remedies' .. but nothing seemed to work for me.. only solution was hermetically sealed AC room :) .and oh they were only a summer phenom.. they disappeared as soon as weather turned somewhat coldish...