Okay, let’s get the hat thing out of the way at the start. Yes, that’s me wearing my ‘blazing-sun-hat’ … our regular baseball-style caps just don’t keep my ears and neck from getting seared in the summer sun, so after several years of thinking about doing something about it, I finally got a "real" hat. Alayne says it makes me look like an Amish farmer, so for those of you who remember my babushka posts about Miss Marker and her head-gear, this is your — and her — chance to get even. Amish-man.
Alright then. Moving on to the subject of this post….
I will admit to getting excited about a couple of odd things that few others share my zeal for. One is working our big compost piles and turning a mass of horse manure, stall bedding and hay into rich, dark loamy stuff that looks like Iowa topsoil. The other "oh-my-gosh-how-exciting-is-this" moment is when our regular shipment of ‘fly predators’ arrives.
Horse people who visit us have commented in the past about how few flies we have. Generally, having large animals means having lots of flies because they’re attracted to all the manure. And although we do still fly-spray our horses (more for mosquitoes than anything else), we have very few flies around the barns and animal cottages — certainly not anywhere near the kind of fly problem you’d expect at a place with this many horses and other animals.
The reason is because we use a biological control called fly predators, which are tiny wasps whose entire goal in life is to find fly larvae and kill them. They have the same life cycle as the fly, so if you time their release correctly, you can pretty much have these wasps suppress flies all summer long. They don’t work on all flies, but the common housefly and others.
We get these fly predators from Spalding Labs, and they arrive every three weeks via the U.S. Mail in a cellophane bag that I’m holding in the photo above. The bag holds some wood shavings and the brown pupa, or cocoon, that each of these beneficial insects is in at this stage of their life. The pupa looks like a brown rice kernel. When they first hatch, they’re as small as gnats, but grow into little wasps that don’t sting or bite or bother people or animals. They pretty much hover near the ground around manure and other decaying organic material, searching for fly larvae.
When they start hatching, the predators look like this:
And that means it’s time to start spreading!
There are about 50,000 of these predators in the bag, and I walked around this morning spreading them in the corrals and barns and across the yards. We begin early — in late spring — spreading the predators and keep at it all summer long and into early fall.
Because they do have a certain odor to them, I put on a surgical glove before beginning my ‘predator walk’ around the ranch. I reach into the bag, pull out a handful of the pupa, and toss them as I go. Here’s a close-up:
As to why I like these little guys so much … I just think it’s really neat to have a beneficial insect out there controlling flies for you. Not only is it a healthy and natural way to control flies, it works.
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 
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