Everyone can probably agree on one thing – summer brings way too many bugs, and no one enjoys that.
While it’s expected to encounter insects outside, since that’s their natural habitat, it’s pretty frustrating when they start invading your home.
Luckily, the team behind Homesteading Off the Grid, who know a lot about Southern living, have some advice to make things easier this season.
As a group focused on self-sufficiency and gardening education, they put together a video showing a simple method to keep flies out of your home.
The best part? You won’t need much to get started.
This hack is super minimalist.
You only need one plastic bag and exactly 4 pennies.
You probably have those handy already, so you can jump right into making this.
You’ll also need some water.
Tap, hose, bottled, it doesn’t matter. The final supply you need is a length of rope.
Once you have assembled those supplies you can begin to put your fly repellant together.
First, you open up your Ziploc bag and put the pennies in there.
Then, you fill the bag up halfway with water. It’s important that you don’t fill the bag up entirely with water, because you’ll need some space for the next part.
The next step is to grab your rope.
Good thing you didn’t fill your plastic bag up all the way, because now you have to wrap a rope around the bag to seal it up.
Leave a lot of length on the rope so that you can hang this bag up because you’ll be doing that later.
Lastly, hang up your bag.
Because flies most often get in the house through an open door or window, you should stake a spot out near your front door that is excellent for hanging this up.
Maybe you already have a nail or a hook outside your door, or you have a light fixture close to the entrance. Whatever you can find, tie the bag around it, and leave it hanging.
Another important tip is to make sure that the bag is in a spot that gets some sunlight.
It’s important to make sure that the sun will hit the pennies because that is an essential part of this hack. Another tip to keep flies away is prevention.
You don’t want anything in your house or too close to your house that will attract hoards of flies in the first place. The guide in the video explains how last summer, his household had a big housefly problem because their chicken coop was too close to their house, and that attracted the flies.
Another thing that will draw in flies is a big old mess of food or other things they like to eat on, so there’s your incentive to keep your house tidy.
Why does this work?
There are a number of theories about it. As you can see if you hold the bag up to the light, the sun hits the pennies and refracts through the water and the bag.
Flies get repelled by this bag because of the refraction and reflection of the light, but not just because they don’t like light.
While the host of the video claims that this is because flies believe that the light looks too much like the eyes of the spider, others aren’t so sure about that.
The Tennessee Farm Bureau agrees that this trick works, but says it is more likely that the light simply just confuses the bugs.
Homesteading Off the Grid swears by this trick, and they’re not the only ones.
“Did it work for us last summer? It did, otherwise we wouldn’t be showing you this and we wouldn’t be doing it again this summer.”
This fly-repelling trick has been used for generations in the South during the warmer months.
Now, thanks to this helpful video, anyone—no matter where they live—can follow the same easy steps to keep their home bug-free.
Check out the video below to see the full method explained!
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