Steve: You came in here and you showed me a very interesting horse fly I've never seen that but I have seen some others and I've had the experience of being bitten by horse flies.

Art: Really?

Where were you when you were being attacked Steve: At Fentress road in Chesapeake.

Art: You know exactly where it was.

(laughs) Steve: On a horse farm.

Art: Oh gosh, yeah.

Horse flies breed in wetland areas.

So the females will lay an egg mass on plants on plants that are hanging over the edge of a pond The larvae drop into the mud and that's where they complete their development And they're predators.

They feed on other aquatic invertabrates.

Steve: That's not a real bite, or is it?

Art: The adult females bite.

Steve: They bite.

Art: Right.

Their mouth parts are modified for cutting through the skin cutting through the capillaries and then sopping up the blood that wells up into the wound Mosquitos for example They have piercing sucking mouth parts and they will puntcure your skin right into the capillary and then they draw blood right out of your circulatory system So it's an entirely different system.

Both of these insects incorporate chemicals in their saliva that keep the blood flowing.

THe nice thing about mosquitoes is, if you want to look at it this way, is they also add a little anesthetic to it.

So, you don't know you're being attacked right away.

Horse flies, no, there's nothing anesthetic about it at all.

One of the really neat horse flies in the eastern United states is the green horse fly.

This is a species that comes out at night.

In fact its name tells you everything you need to know.

Chlorotabanus crepuscularis The green corpuscular horse fly.

Corpuscular means flying at dusk or at dawn But this thing flies into the night, is attracted to lights And the females do bite.

although I've never experienced them first hand.

And as you know horse flies are incredibly persistent.

You can brush them off, shoo them off, But back to your story about being along the Chesapeake It's wetland areas where you see large concentrations of horse flies, and deer flies too.

They're cousins.

They're strong flyers.

They can go pretty good distances They have excellent vision.

The males don't bite at all but the females are the ones that draw that blood meal so their eggs will mature.

They're really amazing animals.