The petition has attracted a number of comments from other local people, including one who lives a 20-minute walk away from Andrew and Davies. \u201cI\u2019m shooing 40-plus flies out of my kitchen regularly throughout the day,\u201d the commenter says. \u201cIt\u2019s a constant battle.\u201d Andrew says he has spoken to many neighbours who are struggling with the problem: one orders takeaways every day in the summer to avoid having to cook, while another has draped their newborn baby\u2019s cot in a mosquito net. \u201cThey\u2019ve all had enough,\u201d Andrew and Davies\u2019s neighbour Bryan Stahl says, when we walk over the road to his house, which the street\u2019s residents generally consider to be the worst affected by the infestation.<\/p>\n
![\"Fly](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Fly_infestation_in_Congleton_-_loop--ab779269-b955-4224-9f53-ce676b72f4a8-1.0.0000000.jpg\")
Fly infestation in Congleton – loop<\/p>\n
Though it\u2019s hard to believe as we swat flies away while we chat, today is a relatively mild day for flies, Stahl tell me, because it is breezier than it has been in recent weeks. At the height of the recent heatwave, the 54-year-old and his partner stayed inside, or in garden chairs under a gazebo walled with fly nets. Davies and Andrew have a similar structure for their garden, which they set up when their daughters want to use their paddling pool. Stahl, a higher level teaching assistant in a school, has spent about \u00a3500 on the gazebo and numerous fly screens, he thinks \u2013 and is considering forking out thousands more for permanent fly shutters. \u201cIt makes you feel like you\u2019ve got a really dirty house,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Even though you would be hard-pressed to find anyone as anti-fly right now as the residents of West Heath, it\u2019s not as if flies are popular with many people. Whether it\u2019s Jeff Goldblum\u2019s gruesome transformation into a fly in David Cronenberg\u2019s 1986 horror film The Fly, or God sending swarms of flies as one of the 10 plagues inflicted on the Egyptians to persuade the Pharaoh to set the Israelites free in the Old Testament, the messaging is clear: flies are disgusting.<\/p>\n
But could they be due a rebrand? After all, bees can be just as buzzy and annoying, and even sting us, but that doesn\u2019t seem to have damaged their \u201ccute\u201d reputation, their likeness printed on T-shirts or tablecloths. Like bees, flies are pollinators and \u201cessential to a healthy planet,\u201d says Andrew Whitehouse, head of operations at the invertebrate conservation charity Buglife. In fact, he adds, there are some plants that are only pollinated by flies \u2013 including the cacao tree. \u201cSo if you didn\u2019t have flies, you wouldn\u2019t have chocolate.\u201d<\/p>\n
And though we might find it gross that flies are so attracted to faeces or rotting matter, it is actually a good thing that they are. \u201cFly larvae or maggots will eat lots of dead organic material,\u201d Whitehouse says. \u201cIn doing that, they\u2019re recycling nutrients back into the soil, they\u2019re getting rid of those things like dead bodies and dung. That prevents the spread of disease as well. So it\u2019s incredibly important.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition, \u201cloads and loads of other animals eat flies\u201d, Whitehouse says. \u201cSpiders spring to mind, but lots of vertebrates as well. So birds and bats and amphibians and reptiles and fish all feed on either adult flies or their larvae. And they\u2019re a really important food source for lots of these animals.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Everyone\u2019s had enough\u2019 \u2026 Bryan Stahl. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
There are more than 7,000 species of fly found in the UK, including bluebottles, greenbottles, hoverflies, mosquitoes, fruit flies and crane flies (daddy longlegs). Houseflies (your classic chunky black fly; probably what comes to mind when most of us think of a fly) are generally considered the UK\u2019s most common, although it is difficult to say for sure, because \u201cweirdly, not enough people study flies\u201d, says Erica McAlister, a fly expert and Natural History Museum curator.<\/p>\n
Houseflies are important pollinators all over the world \u2013 in fact, McAlister says, a cousin of the common housefly is the dominant pollinator<\/a> in the Arctic. \u201cPeople are stuck on bees being the most important pollinators \u2013 and they are good, I\u2019m not going to deny that,\u201d she says. But while bee larvae don\u2019t do anything except consume food until they have grown into their adult form, flies are \u201ckicked out at birth\u201d, and as larvae \u201cthey\u2019re out there already helping clean up our environment\u201d. And for anyone stuck on the idea that flies aren\u2019t as cute as bees, she urges them to \u201cgo and look up a bee-fly<\/a>\u201d, which she says is \u201carguably one of the cutest species in the UK\u201d.<\/p>\n double quotation markIf insects die, we are on a downward spiral very quickly<\/p>\n Sure, a fly that has been \u201cwalking from faeces to food or decomposing food to another food\u201d could be transporting pathogens, McAlister admits \u2013 but in \u201cmuch the same way as if you handle money or if you go into a pub or if you shake hands with people\u201d. As for flies \u201cvomiting\u201d on food, another complaint you often hear from fly-haters, it is not \u201cvomiting\u201d in the same way we think about humans throwing up, she says. \u201cThey\u2019re not bringing up gut contents\u201d, but releasing digestive enzymes on to food to break it down, \u201cbecause they do not have biting mouth parts \u2013 they basically have a straw or a sponge with which they can suck up these ingredients.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of dwelling on flies\u2019 negative associations, she says, \u201cI try to get people to think of them as like, \u2018It\u2019s amazing, you\u2019ve got these wild animals roaming around in front of your face.\u2019\u201d McAlister encourages people to learn about flies\u2019 \u201cfascinating\u201d metamorphosis from larvae to adult fly, or the fact that they can land upside down, or that their eyes consist of thousands of facets that act like individual cameras. Every second, \u201cthey are processing thousands upon thousands of images\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n It is all the more important to think positively about flies given that insects as a whole, including flies, are largely in decline. Although some migrant species are bucking the trend, the UK\u2019s local species that rely on specific host plants or locations are \u201csuffering badly\u201d as the country becomes less accommodating to wildlife, McAlister says. \u201cWe need our politicians to really work at encompassing all of their decisions with an ecological framework,\u201d she believes. And that\u2019s in order to protect our own future, not just the future of flies: \u201cIf we die, insects won\u2019t care,\u201d McAlister says. \u201cBut if insects die, we are pretty much on a very downward spiral very quickly\u201d \u2013 because of our reliance on their pollination services.<\/p>\n Alex Andrew, who has swathed his daughters\u2019 paddling pool in fly nets. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n McAlister is not saying that we should all be living like Davies and Andrew. She is well aware that flies en masse can be a problem \u2013 but killing them, particularly in \u201ca horrible and inhumane way\u201d such as via fly tape, isn\u2019t always the answer. Paradoxically, creating fly-friendly environments such as ponds in gardens, or even \u201ca bucket on the veranda\u201d, invites all kinds of wildlife, she says, including fly predators like birds and frogs, so flies actually get eaten and end up bothering humans less.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is an argument\u201d for pest control when it comes to fly infestations, she says, but the most important thing to do is to \u201cfind out why that\u2019s happened. Because the flies are an indicator that maybe something else is going on.\u201d When fly infestations are reported, as they are every summer (currently, residents in Sileby, Leicestershire<\/a> and Llanelli, Carmarthenshire<\/a> are suffering along with those in West Heath), usually a link can be found \u201cto some sort of waste event or some sort of environmental perturbation\u201d, the curator says.<\/p>\n Davies and her neighbours think their fly problem is connected to a local recycling plant run by the company Tandom. In a statement sent to the Guardian, Tandom says it has \u201cimplemented a range of additional precautionary measures\u201d, and is \u201cworking constructively with the Environment Agency, Cheshire East council and our independent pest control specialists\u201d, but emphasised: \u201cThere is currently no evidence that flies are breeding on our site.\u201d A spokesperson for the Environment Agency confirmed that it is in touch with Tandom, and says it has instructed the company \u201cto take immediate steps to tackle the issue\u201d, adding that it \u201cwill not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement action if required\u201d.<\/p>\n Rather than automatically blaming flies when they bother us, we should look for potential human involvement, McAlister thinks. While we often think of house flies as dirty because they feed on faeces and are found in dirty areas, they actually \u201chave to be the absolute opposite \u2013 they have to be exceptionally clean because they are sometimes in a bad environment\u201d, she says. \u201cBut it\u2019s our environment; we\u2019re the ones who\u2019ve made this environment. So, you know, we\u2019re throwing stones at an indicator that something has maybe gone wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps it\u2019s humans, then, not flies, who are the true pests.<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Francesca Davies\u2019s living room is absolutely teeming with flies. You can\u2019t enter the contact centre worker\u2019s home without…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":718625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-718624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/718625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}