Fly & Flying Insect Infestation Diagnosis and Removal in Belmar, NJ

Challenge

One of our commercial accounts, a restaurant in Belmar, was having trouble with flying insects. Flies have extremely unsanitary behaviors, just like roaches, and businesses, especially restaurants and other food service or storage businesses, must resolve these infestations quickly and definitively. Restaurants commonly have house fly infestations as well as small fly “gnat” infestations such as fruit, phorid, and drain flies that become all too common as we transition out of winter and outdoor temperatures start to warm. Regardless of the particular type of fly, flies can harm your restaurant’s reputation and the food coming out of your kitchen. Flies carry pathogenic microorganisms on their bodies, making them a serious disease vector capable of causing food poisoning.

It is important to keep your restaurant a “no fly zone.” Restaurants best manage fly problems proactively. It is important to have good sanitation protocols with food handling, quickly cleaning up spills, A restaurant can also take steps with facility maintenance by caulking and sealing potential entry points, screening vents, doors, and windows, and by having correctly fitting door sweeps. Installing two sets of doors into the kitchen adds an extra boundary line and using wall-mounted fans (“air curtains”) blows air out against pests, making the boundary lines even tougher to cross.

Solution

With this Belmar restaurant, to help get rid of the fly infestation, we installed two fly light traps, also known as ILTs (insect light traps) on walls near exit doors.  These devices use an insect-attracting lamp to lure insects to an adhesive trapping glue board. They lure and capture virtually any flying insect: house flies, bottle flies, mosquitoes, gnats, and moths. With the traps we set up for this restaurant, the sticky traps captured flies and occasional invaders, as well as some beautiful white moths. With fly light traps, strategic location is key. Generally, you want wall-mounted fly light traps to be placed low to best catch day-flying insects. For example, house flies like to fly low, often skimming the floor. The traps substantially reduced the fly population, and we will continue to replace the adhesive glue boards until the flies are gone. We will also work with the restaurant to improve ways to prevent and discourage flies from entering the restaurant in the first place.