THE FERTILE FLY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 502, 21 September 1912, Page 3

THE FERTILE FLY.

The editor of Pearson's Magazine is one of the latest cunverts to the doctrine that the fly, like the House of Lords, is "useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished.'' In a recent issue of the magazine the facts concerning the fertility of the fly and the effectiveness of the insect as a means of distributing germs are set forth in an interesting and attractive manner. The female house fly, we are told, has a short life but a busy one. It lasts but five weeks, and those five weeks Mrs Fly devotes to feeding, cleaning herself, and laying eggs. She lays eggs in batches of 100 to 150 at a time, and in the course of her life she will lay five or six batches. So quickly do the eggs hatch out so and so rapidly do Mrs Fly's daughters mature that before she goes to her last rest she may be a great-great-grandother, with 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 descendants. The favourite place for egg-laying i 3 a heap of stable manure, but any old rubbish heap containing moist garbage will serve. Within twenty-four hours of the laying of the egg the grub appears, and exists as a grub for about a week. It feeds on the refuse amongst which it was hatched. As it feeds it grows, finally attaining a length of three-quarters of an inch. It changes its skin, turns white, contracts, and is transformed into a chrysalis of brownish hue. In three days the pupa case breaks and the perfect insect comes forth to embark on its sinister career. The fly is beautifully and wonderfully made, but it bears on its wings, on the hairs of its legs and inside its little body the germs of disease and death. An examination of several hundreds of flies under the microscope has shown that every fly carries an average of 1,222,570 germs. One fly was allowed to walk about in a culture "f typhoid germs, and was then transferred to a gelatine plate. In the trail left by that fly on a tiny slip of gelatine were 30,000 bacteria, sufficient to cause an epidemic to seize a whole city. The crusade against the fly is being taken up as enthusiastically in Britain as it is in America.