My son Michael’s dog, Andy likes to chase and catch bees when he’s outside. At first Mike was concerned that he was getting stung in the mouth before he swallowed them but that became a challenge because the dog loved to do it. If that was happening the thrill of the catch must have been worth it.

The other day a fly came in with Andy, he tried to catch it and we tried to swat it with no luck. Then my cat, Daisy spotted it under the kitchen table and jumped down off the chair and wounded that fly and Mike finished it off.

There are many ways of catching flies. Years ago I remember the disgusting fly paper we would hang. I wondered if you could still buy it and found that a place in Louisville, Kentucky still sold it. Then I found that my son had some in his storage unit in Nyack. Go figure.

Now there are electric bug zappers. These seem to attract insects so you wind up with more instead of less. We had one and have stopped using it. Why should we kill the neighbors’ bugs?

Let them take care of their own. Another method is to put pennies in a plastic bag full of water and place it near where you sit outside. I tried that a few times and didn’t know if it was a coincidence if I got less mosquito bites or not so I gave that up. Why waste pennies?

Since I am inclined to save things, some of those pennies might be left over from when I was a kid and visited my grandparents in Middletown. They had a lot of flies on their porch and paid me a penny for every fly that I killed. I believe they used the honor system and didn’t require me to be an undertaker for all those dead bodies.

My dad would catch flies in his hand. Even though I don’t catch flies that way, he taught me something. If you approach flies from the rear, they don’t see death coming because they don’t have eyes at the back of their heads, so when I try to swat a fly I do it from that angle and it usually works.

Here’s an old saying that’s true, if you don’t have air conditioning or screen doors: ‘Open the door, the flies swarm in, Shut the door and you’re sweatin’ agin’.