Housefly

AMAZING Facts about the Common Housefly

• A house fly can beat its wings 200 times per second, while most hummingbirds average 90 wingbeats/sec. However, we did find that during courtship the ruby-throated hummingbird beats its wings 200 times per second.
• Each female fly can lay approximately 9,000 eggs in a life time, in several batches of about 75 to 150. The eggs are white and are about 1.2 mm in length. Within a day, larvae (maggots) hatch from the eggs; they live and feed on (usually dead and decaying) organic material, such as garbage, carrion or feces

• The common housefly is a perfect host for many types of bacteria… proven carriers of such germs as gangrene, Typhoid, leprosy, tuberculosis, amoebic dysentery, bubonic plague, and listeria, just to name a few.
• Most of the rest, 85% to 95% of the total, were caught within about 2 miles of the release site within the first 4 days after they were turned loose. A few flies have been shown to travel 5 to 20 mi
• True flies are insects of the order Diptera (from the Greek di = two, and ptera = wings). Their most obvious distinction from other orders of insects is that a typical fly possesses a pair of flight wings on the mesothorax and a pair of halteres, derived from the hind wings, on the metathorax.
• les but these tend to be “record” individuals.
• 
  
• The common housefly has no mouth. Instead, it has an eating tube through which it vomits a drop of fluid from its stomach and deposits it on its intended meal. This fluid is then sucked up along with the nutrients it has dissolved, leaving behind untold numbers of germs.
• A fly may travel as far as thirteen miles from its birthplace.
• The common housefly has a maximum flying speed of five miles per hour… even though its wings beat 20 thousand times per minute.
• The fly has four thousand separate lenses in each eye – eight thousand in all – providing wide angle vision which is in fact omnidirectional.
• The female fly may lay as many as 21 batches of offspring, each containing up to 130 eggs.
• The larvae [maggots] normally hatch in about two days. Larvae feed on surrounding waste… and grow and shed their skin twice before entering the pupae stage.
• The larvae-pupae stage lasts from one to two weeks. The adult fly emerges from the pupae stage full grown.
• The adult fly has a normal life of about thirty (30) days during warm weather although flies live as long as five months.
• During cold weather the larvae-pupae stage may last for weeks or even months, with the adult fly emerging in warm weather.
• In the summer reproduction months (April to September), the descendents of one pair of flies, if all lived and reproduced normally, would number 191,000,000,000,000,000,000… enough to cover the entire land area of the world to a depth of 18 feet.
•