Ah, summer. What could be better than summer? The long, warm days are followed by balmy, warm nights. This is the season for festivals, barbecues, work parties, and outings.
Your office will inevitably be full of bugs. You can find ants, wasps, flies, and even stinging nettles in the office. If your office is located in rural areas, you’ll find a wider variety of creepy crawlies. ).
Add swarms of insects and long days away from work to create a recipe for an infestation.
While you can minimize the impact of having many bugs in your office, remember that they will get in no matter what.
Summer is a time when flies are most active due to the abundance of food available and warm temperatures, which triggers their instinct to reproduce. Nesting sites can be found anywhere that is relatively undisturbed and has a constant food source.
Bins remain a favorite. Bins are a favorite because they’re dark, hidden, and filled with rotting things. The smelly bins will attract flies that carry eggs, who will then take advantage of any opportunity to settle down on a hot summer day. Food scraps that fall behind kitchen units in offices or cracks on countertops can also rot completely unnoticed.
The worst thing you can do is return from a weekend away to find your office filled with maggots or the swarms of flies that they have become. It can become quite disruptive once it reaches that point!
It can be difficult to determine the exact location of the fly infestation before the flies explode. It’s possible to find maggots here and there and wonder where they came from. Then you realize that a hole has been left in the bin bag for a whole week, and a family of them is gathered at the bottom of the office kitchen bin.
At this stage, getting rid of maggots is relatively easy (even if they are a bit gross). When they become flies, it’s then time to take action. A single fly can lay 150 eggs within 48 hours. If there is a food source like a half-eaten, rotting lunch in the bin, mother flies are happy to share.
Imagine if you have ever seen a fly crawling on a window. Now multiply that by several hundred. There will be so many flies that you won’t even be able to see through the window. If you disturb them, it will be chaos as you run into a cloud of angry flies.
It is best to avoid this mess by doing some good old-fashioned office cleaning. These are the best tips to prevent larvae and flies at the office this summer.
- Regularly empty your office bins.
Over the summer, a weekly bin-emptying routine is not enough. Maggots are better outside than inside your bins, so make sure to open them as often as you can into your company’s wheelie bin or commercial waste container. The heat accelerates the life cycle of flies, which reproduce very rapidly. In 48 hours, eggs can turn into larvae or pupae. So make sure you empty your bins every two days and clean them completely on the weekend.
Bonus tip – Use smaller bins to encourage regular emptying in the kitchen and communal areas.
- How to clean bins
To clean an infested trash can, it’s best to combine heat with disinfectant. Pouring boiling water into the bin will kill any larvae or eggs that are still alive. Disinfecting the bin will remove the odors that attract larvae and harmful bacteria. Check that your bin will not warp or leak under heat.
The sun will dry out the bin completely if you do this in the summer. Sunlight also helps to clean the bin with UV rays. Do this at least once a week to ensure that all little invaders are dealt with.
While you may think vinegar is a good cleaner, it actually attracts hungry flies. Fruit rots and produces a vinegary smell, which attracts flies. This is our last tip to avoid maggots.
- How to make a flytrap
Fly is impulsive and will go to any food source, even if that means death. You can trap them with a simple bottle of fizzy drinks and some bait to dispose of them later.
Here is a link for a homemade fly trap that you can use in your office to capture flies and stop them from becoming a larger problem.