Argh, I'm going nuts! So 3 days ago we noticed there was a half dozen large flies in our kitchen and hallway. Gross. I killed them all and cleaned up, but then a few hours later there were more!! They are bigger than house flies, and after inspecting a dead one I'm pretty sure they're blow flies as they're large and blue-y metallic in colour.
We closed all the doors in our flat to pinpoint which room they were coming from. Narrowed it down to kitchen/hallway, checked all the cupboards for obvious culprits and absolutely nothing. So we figured it either had to be coming from up in the loft (there are light fixtures in the kitchen and some piping that have open holes up there), or from our downstairs neighbour. We taped up all the holes to the loft and still.. Flies.
Now this bring me to the downstairs neighbour. She's an 84 year old woman, and she knocked on the door Saturday to ask if we had any "critters" in the flat. She meant animals, not bugs, as something had been in her place and eaten and moved apples across her kitchen! So that's a large animal! This is after she thought she had a mouse problem last month and had exterminators in to take care of the problem. Today I find out that they had told her to be on the look out for dead bodies! Never having had any sort of pest problem before, I don't know if this is normal, but it seems odd that exterminators would just leave a potential further pest problem.
Anyways, I can't for the life of me figure out how they're getting into our flat. Obviously the easiest way to stop our problem would be to seal off wherever they're getting in and let the problem just die out. They can't live forever, right? Well, since there are no dead flies in our cupboards or drawers I know they're not coming in through there. The only other thing I could think of is that they could be coming from behind the washing machine, but I can't pull it out.
if the dead animal was in our flat we would have a ton more flies, as apparently infestations are normally dozens of the buggers at a time, not just a dozen over the course of a day. Also, I think we would smell it... and since there are no food sources for them in our flat they would die on their own after a couple days anyways, but does anyone know how long it would take to wait it out? Or have any other suggestions?
