These Health Code Violations Have Wings

Why Flies Want In…

Flies want three things: food, water, and inside your establishment. To get these three things, they do what we simplistically refer to as "flying."

From the moment they emerge from their pupae as adults, flies are on a high-speed binge. Wheeling and banking through space and out of harm's way, they're moving rotting wet pathogen-laden organic matter through their machinery faster than any woodchipper. It's gross, but it's true: the entire time flies are flying – or landing, mating, laying eggs, and dying – they're also eating and producing waste.

To accomplish this noble work, flies are equipped with brains and bodies that are at least as much more powerful than ours as they are smaller. There's that outrageous metabolism. Plus, of course, the wings. Flies can feel and taste through their wings. They can read the wind and smell through their antennae. They have gyroscopes.

But above all, flies are about the eyes. For something that regurgitates its way through life, the fly is fastidious about its eyes, constantly grooming them around the edges to keep debris away. You would be, too, if your eyes were the fastest visual system on the planet.

Flies have two of those, plus another bonus set of eyes on the top of their heads that we don't even understand. And, you know how your eyes give you a single view? Theirs do, too, except our view comes from two lenses and theirs comes from thousands. Our view span extends about 120 degrees; theirs, 360.

Their eyes can't focus, but they can detect polarized colors and colors on the spectrum that we can't. Our optical flow – the apparent motion that we detect through our eyes – is based on a rate of about 6 frames per second. They see at 250, and their optical flow is, simply, sick.

A fly's eyes recognize even the slightest movements in a wide field, but also react faster, sending information to their brains at super-high frequencies. What's more, their comparatively minuscule 100,000-neuron brains, nervous systems, and musculature, do, too.

…and How to Keep Them Out

Back at the restaurant, the fly is millimeters from entering the drain when suddenly, a burp of noxious air disgorges a fleck of something wet through the narrow openings in the drain cover.

To avoid a body blow with the relative impact of an airbag, the fly, in the blink of a human eye, must switch up a pattern in a hinge at the base of its wing that corrects its pitch, yaw, roll, and trajectory for the disruption in flight path more than ten times until it spins away to safety and the next airborne whiff of rotting food.

And all the joint had to do was screen off its outdoor drain. Flies are amazing, but what's even more amazing is how easy it is to keep them out of a restaurant. KaTom has the equipment and supplies required to fight back against fly invasion.

Many solutions are easy to install and require little day-to-day effort from employees to be effective – such as air doors, fly traps and insect zappers, and industrial fans –while others, such as floor maintenance necessities and janitorial essentials, will help your employees carry out routine cleaning procedures.