Water bags to repel flies

Keep away flies with this one trick! (I really despise clickbait taglines, but it’s true this time.)

When we were on vacation in Florida, we went to a restaurant that had, around its entrances, hanging bags of water each with a handful of pennies inside.

Curious, we asked about the bags of water. The waitress explained that flies perceived the bags as spider webs, and stayed away. Indeed, we noticed no flies, despite the open eating area. As it turns out, the “spider web” explanation is but one of a few different explanations of how it may work.

Confirmation bias or not, it seemed to work at the restaurant, so we decided to give it a go for Namine’s birthday party, which we held at a park. If it worked, great! If not, then we were out a few sandwich bags and some pennies. No big loss.

At Namine’s party, we had a lot of food. I mean a lot. We had two kinds of pulled pork, fruit, veggies, chips, and more. We had enough to feed sixty people, plus two sheet cakes. And as far as I know, no one complained of flies. (I certainly didn’t notice any.)

A lot of food, protected by two of eight total water-and-penny-filled bags around the picnic area.

This seems pretty well in line with Snopes’ claim of confirmation bias. I mean, you can’t logically prove a negative. But I will say this: after most everyone was gone, we took down the water bags after packing up all the food. Only after the bags were gone did the flies come, and come they did. They started to swarm all over the empty dishes, and that was confirmation enough for me that the bags filled with water and pennies worked after all.

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