Some fly facts
Deer flies do not have piercing/sucking mouthparts like mosquitoes. They bite a
hole in your
skin with their strong mandibles, put a little saliva-like material in the wound
to keep the
blood from clotting and lap up the blood with a sponge-like proboscis .
The deer fly
usually buzzes silently around your head in ever-tightening circles. Eventually,
it will find an exposed portion of your hand, arm or upper leg. The bite usually
results in a red welt that will disappear in a day or so (but itches like hell).
(Hmm. Not too many deer around here. If deer flies are named after what they bite perhaps they really should be called fat old farang photographer flies)
The house fly "hums" in the key of F and beats its wings over 20,000 times a minute (http://members.aol.com/YESedu/trivia.html)
Beginning with one pair of house flies in April, there would be a total of 191,000,000,000,000,000,000 flies by August if all the descendants of this pair lived and reproduced normally.
Long-legged flies' wings beat several hundred times per second- they achieve their highly complex aerial manoeuvres with only one pair of wings, the other having being converted into a gyroscope.