KID TRIPPING Blackfly Dance
Camping Bath Bag Have you decided that trying to swat blackflies with a flyswatter is just a waste of time? There are just too many of them to bother. So instead, use your clean, never-been-successful flyswatter, do the blackfly dance and create a neat camping bath bag. Here’s how.
Materials: • Clean flyswatter
By Misty Eves Blackfly Facts
• Blackflies are about a quarter of the size of regular houseflies
• Blackflies come out in late spring. • Flies don’t grow. They are born full size.
• Blackflies have a life cycle with an aquatic larval stage which can occur in fast-flowing waters.
• The blackflies that bite you are females.
• While blackflies are little more than pests in North America, in South America and Africa some species of blackflies carry parasites that can cause blindness.
• Most people do not realize they’ve been bitten until they see a spot of blood on their skin because the blackfly injects a mild anaesthetic into the skin before she scoops out a piece of flesh for her dinner.
• The eggs are laid in an aquatic environment where they remain for the egg and larval stages of their life cycle.
• Blackflies are covered with hairs that are senstive to movement to help them detect air currents that alert them before swatting hands arrive.
• If you think the blackflies were bad on your last camp- ing trip, in 1923, swarms of blackflies were reportedly responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 sheep, horses and cattle in Romania and Bulgaria.
• Blackflies usually bite during the day in outdoor shaded or partially-shaded areas.
• Blackflies do not bite late at night or while indoors. • Dark-blue clothes attract more flies than white clothes.
• Blackflies are attracted to campers by body heat, perspi- ration, perfumes, toiletries and the carbon dioxide and moisture in exhaled breath.
• The Black Fly Song by Wade Hemsworth is a fitting trib- ute to our springtime nemesis… “It was blackfly blackfly everywhere, crawlin’ in your whiskers and crawlin’ in your hair, swimmin’ in the soup and swimmin’ in the tea, the devil take the blackfly but let me be…”
6 FAMILY CAMPING
• Plain, light coloured towel, ask your parents for permission first
• Paint—one or more colours • Large pie tin, one for each colour of paint • Sewing needle and thread
Instructions:
This is an outdoor craft that requires wearing old clothes, paint aprons or bathing suits and enough space to dance and be messy.
1) Cut off a strip from the towel about two inches wide and set it aside.
2) Pour a little paint into a pie tin, enough to cover the bottom of the pan, but not too much or else the design will be too globby. Use one pie tin for each colour of paint that you are going to use.
3) Lay the towel out on the ground or hanging down from a clothesline or tree branch.
4) Dip the flyswatter into a paint tin. Wipe off the excess paint on the edge of the pan.
5) Start your blackfly dance. Jump around and swat the towel with the flyswatter. Keep swatting the towel until there is no more paint on the flyswat- ter and then repeat step four until the towel is completely covered in paint on one side. Try using different types of swatting techniques and differ- ent flyswatters to make different patterns. Sing- ing, dancing and flapping around doesn’t really improve the end product but it keeps the blackflies from landing on you, and you might have so much fun you forget they are even there.
6) Leave your towel out to completely dry in the sun.
7) Now, quietly, and hidden from the bugs in your tent or trailer, fold the dried towel in half with the painted side on the outside so you can see your pattern.
8) Sew up the two sides of the towel – leaving the top, the side directly opposite the folded side, open.
9) Make a handle for your bag by sewing on the towel strip you cut off in step one.
Now you have your own fantastic flyswatter camping bath bag. And you weren’t driven crazy by the black- flies, although it might have looked like it.
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