In any human home there is a whole universe of organisms invisible or almost imperceptible to our eyes. It doesn’t matter how isolated the house is. They are always there .
In fact, if we count ten flies in a house, it is likely that five of them are of different species. In this sense, the diversity of flies in homes is astonishing and exceeds that of spiders, ants, wasps or bees.
Fly diversity
House flies, fruit flies, shield flies, meat flies, riverbank flies, tiny black scavenger flies, winter crane flies, dung flies, blue flies … the number of fly species is endless.
There are 160,000 known species of flies, and entomologists can only guess at the number of species that we do not know, which ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.
Sometimes they are a nuisance, but flies are necessary . For example, without them chocolate would not exist: gnats are tiny insects that feed mainly on blood, but chocolate gnats like nectar and carry pollen from one plant to another.
Not surprisingly, these insects have been venerated by different cultures throughout the centuries , the Egyptian being one of those that paid the most tribute to flies. In fact, the flies were seen by the pharaohs as synonymous with bravery and resistance to the enemy.
However, flies are also dangerous . More than we think. Even more than the dreaded cockroaches. House flies often feed on faeces, garbage and decomposing animals and lay eggs there and in other disgusting places, the common house fly is believed to transmit at least 65 diseases to people, including diarrhea, dysentery or cholera.