General Question
Suggest effective ways to kill fly maggots or pupae?
This is one of the most disgusting things I have ever dealt with in my entire life.. Just thinking about it makes me want to vomit. Please do not proceed if you have a weak stomach.
On Day 1 I came home and found fly maggots crawling on the bare kitchen floor; apparently they’d just hatched and migrated from the kitchen bin. I frantically googled up how-to’s and tried suggested strategies. Exposing a maggot to salt didn’t work; pouring boiling water over a maggot was messy and took it as long as one minute to die (cruel). Finally I settled on picking them up one by one, a slow process, and dropping them into a bowl of boiling water. I probably killed 30 of them in this manner. If the water cooled down even one bit, the maggot would not die; it was really heat resistant! Not only that, I spotted one maggot disappeared into the impossible gap/crease where the wall and floor met; that was how I realized, “No wonder, they kept coming out of nowhere! Probably squash-resistant as well!”
Watching the maggots cook into white rice grains was traumatizing enough. I thought my nightmare was over when, on Day 4, I spotted some “brown rice grains” on the living room’s carpet and a rug. Turned out these were maggots-turned-pupae. They dug into the carpet and hid there, and all this time I’d been stepping on the carpet. I googled and found that the maggots could migrate as far as 50 meters!
I had to vacuum the carpet; I then emptied the content into a plastic bag and tied it very secure. As for the rug, I hung it outside, letting it expose to harsh August sunlight.
Today is Day 5. I still don’t know what to expect and am paranoia of stepping on the carpet. The rug is still hung outside, LOL.
So as you can tell, I have very little experience dealing with this situation!!! My questions to you are:
1) How would you get rid of house fly maggots—
- on bare floor? (Obviously you have to pick them up when they’re on the floor; how can you vacuum them on bare floor?)
– hidden inside the carpet, invisible? (Can you vacuum the maggots from the carpet?—or is that going to be messy, with their gummy bodies clogging your vacuum cleaner filter (yuck)?)
– hidden inside the rug? (If you hang the rug out in the sun, would that be enough to kill the maggots?)
Please suggest effective solutions… I’m not going to rent a steam vacuum cleaner (as popularly suggested online), and pouring boiling water everywhere on the carpet is out.
2) Same question, but with fly pupae (when they turned brown and immobile).
+ Can you squash them?
+ Do they always remain hidden inside the carpet?
+ Does the process of vacuuming the pupae kill them? When I vacuumed them, they appeared intact inside the dust container.
THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH FOR ANY SUGGESTIONS! Wishing you all a safe and even cleaner kitchen!!!
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