Disco Maggots: The Sequel.

Essential reading before this, is the earlier post entitled "Damned Disco Maggots".


...I was lucky.  The cold weather this Spring held back the escaped maggots from hatching.  They were taking a very long time to hatch, so long that I had almost forgotten about them.   My Australian relatives were able to come visit and then to return home without seeing a single bluebottle.  I had lost all fear that my wife would go ballistic and crucify me in nice time for Easter.

Then one day I had cause to  shout at the wife.  I caught her chasing three flies around the kitchen. But  I had a strong suspicion about where those three flies had originated.   So I sneaked down and sprayed the cellar with flyspray. There were quite a lot of flies down there too, forming planetary systems around my head, and buzzing everywhere.  Hoped to get them all, and then went back down then next day to pick up the bodies before she went down there herself. Fair to say that the ground  below ground was thick with them.   But they were all swept up and, after a new burst of fly spray, I closed the door.

A day or so later I went fishing, having told the wife to keep out of the cellar.  I had cleaned it up a second time and told her not to go down there. I didn't say why. 
Of course being a woman......so, next day, whilst I was still out fishing, she went down. And found several hundred dead flies dead on the floor from my last spraying, and many more in flight, obviously hatched after the spray had diluted itself to an ineffective level. She was not amused.

All very Shroedinger's cat. Had she NOT gone down there she would not have known that the flies existed, never mind whether they were dead or alive on opening the box. Anyway I can now tell Shroedinger that if he puts two cats in the box, one will be dead, and the other will leap out and fly around his wife's head.

My readers will now be wondering whether I went unpunished. NO! I had to suffer two days of going fishing with three of four flies buzzing around in the car, and had to drive with the windows open. Some of the damn maggots had escaped before being put in the cellar.

Nearly five quid wasted!

P.S.   the last time my Australian cousins visited a hedgehog died in the garden ( as I discovered a couple of weeks later).  It died of a huge flea infestation.  I thought hedgehog fleas were hedgehog specific fleas.   Not so.  Every time any of us walked past the spot where the creature lay dead, its fleas must have been pouncing on our legs and clothes.  So my cousins and my carpets became flea infested.  The Ozzies went home with flea bites, and I had to have a man in to disinfect the house and garden.