They started inside of the food recycle bin and are now all over our backyard pavement. How do I get rid of them? What are they?
By S.Y.
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These sound like maggots, which are house fly larvae. They will hatch into houseflies if you leave them alone. You must have some meat in your recycle bin, because you do not usually get maggots on vegetable matter. If these maggots were only in your bin, I wouldn't worry about them, but if you have enough of the dead and rotting material that they are spreading all over, you should likely look into that.
You could kill them something like Raid, or just step on them to kill them. You should bury the meat or dead animal, whatever they are feeding on, deep in the compost, and then it will be decomposed by other bacteria and other insects, along with the vegetation/leaves/grass/etc that you have in the bin. Maggots are not harmful to people, and feed only on rotting flesh, but they will eventually hatch into house flies or flies of some other kind. Blow flies, apparently, are another species that you might have. I get that info from shows such as CSI!
They're probably maggots! Fly larvae. Bleach will kill them - it will also kill anything else you get it on - like the grass and plants.
I'm not an entymologist, but sounds like maggots (larvae) of some fly. Perhaps fruit flies? Are the recycled items carefully washed before placing in bins?
They are called maggots; actually, fly larva. Flies lay eggs in the garbage and the larva hatch from the eggs.
I let something higher up on the food chain take care of them; frogs, and turtles.
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