Lady of the Flies

Oh, God. I walked into the bunny room tonight to find that a first generation set of houseflies had taken up residence in the corner by the window, over Roxy and Rosy (the girlie pigs) cage. I had noticed more flies than usual in the house today but chalked that up to open doors and windows and ill-fitting screens – it was only 83 degrees here today and was a nice, breezy day to have the windows open to air things out. Evidently, the flies are coming from somewhere else and I’m terrified that that somewhere is the bunny room. Wouldn’t you think the highest concentration would be where they hatched?

See, this perturbs me for several reasons. One: while I may not keep my rabbit room sparkling, bleachy clean, I do try and change litter boxes and clean cages frequently enough to avoid something like this happening – for me, that’s one litter box every night, or a litter box change every 5th day. If I notice that someone’s litter box seems heavy or needs to be changed I’ll even go ahead and do it. Two: I HAD a fly infestation like this four years ago which prompted me to rip the carpet/pad out of the rabbit room and paint the concrete floor. The flies had laid their eggs under a plastic storage bin where one of my rabbits had made a puddle without me knowing about it and it hadn’t dried out, so made a nice, warm environment for baby flies to grow. Third: I plain old don’t have time to eradicate flies. There’s no safe way to do it around rabbits except for fly-strips and fly-swatters, and that’s just more time than I can spare.

For now I think I’ve taken care of most of them… there may be one or two hanging out lazily by the ceiling where it’s warm, but I’ll get ‘em eventually. I just hope none of them laid any eggs anywhere. I spent about 90 minutes in the bunny room cleaning the most suspicious-looking litter boxes and a guinea pig cage, and killing as many of the buggers as I could find. These are like mutant flies… it takes more than just a swat to kill them. It seems like they get stunned, fall down, and then I have to step on them, pick them up in a tissue, and flush them to make sure they’re really gone. I’m thinking they may have come from a pile of Moses poo that I picked up and bagged yesterday before mowing the lawn; it was, shall we say, infested when I picked it up, and I foolishly put it in the garage. There were not a lot of flies in the garage, though, and not a lot of traffic in and out today, so I don’t know how they migrated in the house… but that’s my hope. Because otherwise? I have to demolish the bunny room and start all over. And I don’t know if I have the energy for that.

I HATE BUGS.

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