There are few guarantees in life, but one guarantee is inescapable: if you have livestock, you have flies.
One of the best known of these pests is the largest, the bloodsucking horse fly. It is also one of the most difficult to manage, according to entomologist Dr. Sonja Swiger with the Texas A&M Research & Extension Center in Stephenville.
“Horse flies are hard to control,” she says. “They are only on the host long enough to take a blood meal and then they leave.”
When most people mention “horse fly” they think of the big black flies with huge eyes that look like rainbows on an oil slick when the light hits them just right. This horse fly is actually part of a large family, the Tabanidae, which includes both horse and deer flies, and like their distant cousins the mosquito, only the females are bloodsuckers.
A study by now retired Texas A&M entomologist Bart Drees and James Goodwin identified 109 distinct species of horse and deer flies in Texas alone, compared with about 350 species known in North America and 4,500 known worldwide. According to Dr. Swiger, some of these are very specific and localized, while others have evolved to take advantage of large herd animals; though, as many people have painfully learned, horse flies can be fairly opportunistic biters. To read more pick up the February issue of North Texas Farm & Ranch.