A Do-It-Yourself fly catching method solves The Tavern at Bayboro summer-long fly problem.
By Noel Mullins
Over the summer, the owner and manager of The Tavern at Bayboro had a problem: flies.
Every time customers tried to eat a meal or wash it down with ice-cold beer, flies would buzz around them on the patio outside the restaurant.
Owner, Tom Herzhauser and assistant manager, Craig Kennedy, tried every method in the book to get rid of them: bleach the deck, use fans to blow the flies away, even the old penny-in-the-water-bag method — nothing worked.
Then, Herzhauser found the solution inside a five gallon bucket.
The solution isn’t an elegant one, but it works: it’s a makeshift fly trap commonly used by fishermen. The trap includes a fly bait chemical and a couple pieces of shrimp from The Tavern’s stock of seafood.
When he set the bucket up, the results were immediate.
“I would put three pieces of shrimp down and sprinkle a little bit of that stuff right there,” Herzhauser said, pointing to the blue chemical fly bait, “It attracts them and it’s a nerve agent, so it takes them down. Another comes along and they touch one of the ones laying there, and they also become affected and go down as well. It’s kind of weird because I would see flies next to the bucket, on the ground, just spinning around upside down. It works.”
Within three weeks, the large bucket they placed on the deck accumulated thousands of flies and was a quarter of the way full. When the time came to remove the bucket in the last week of July, Herzhauser estimates that it held around 100,000 dead flies.
Herzhauser found the do-it-yourself bucket fly trap tactic on his weekly trip to the Mastry’s Bait & Tackle, the Tavern’s seafood supplier, located on Fourth Street S.
Dale Mastry, owner of Mastry’s Bait & Tackle, told Herzhauser that it helped lower the fly population at his establishment.
Herzhauser and Kennedy, unsure as to how the fly issue grew to be so prevalent in the first place, decided to give the bucket a try.
“We had a few ideas as to what had caused the fly epidemic over summer, but this was the worst any of us have experienced in our careers here. It’s upsetting when guests complain about an issue that you are trying to resolve but can’t,” said Kennedy.
Many thought that the transition into summer was what brought the flies out in hordes, but Herzhauser said it was in conjunction with the tearing down of the old building just behind The Tavern, which once housed the administration for the College of Graduate Studies.
“I’m not sure if anything was in there, I mean the building was vacated for an extended period of time. It all happened when they
started to break this building down, all of the sudden I had a fly problem,” said Herzhauser.
The Tavern managed to get things resolved just in time for their new menu release this fall. Business is sure to be in full swing this semester without the problem of flies landing in a customer’s cold one or on The Tavern’s legendary grouper sandwiches.
“Every day we are hearing positive comments from customers about the fly situation being resolved. The proof is in the bucket,” Kennedy said.
