Fly

In 2001, Garnet Hertz produced an art project in which a complete web server was implanted into a dead fly. Gingerbread is also an architectural term for highly decorated Victorian houses. The 1986 science fiction film The Fly revolves around the accidental merger of a human and a fly. Pain d'épices is a French pastry also made with honey and spices, but not crispy. [2]. Gingerbread is often translated into French as pain d'épices. An example is the painting Portrait of a Carthusian by Petrus Christus, showing a fly sitting on a fake frame. Originally, the term gingerbread (from Latin zingiber via Old French gingebras) referred to preserved ginger, then to a confection made with honey and spices.

In art, extremely life-like flies have sometimes been depicted in the trompe l'oeil paintings of the 15th century. Some recipes add mustard, pepper, raisins, nuts, and/or other spices/ingredients to the batter. The world's rarest known fly family is Eurychoromyidae-Broad-headed Flies [1]. The cake form tends to be a dense, treaclely (molasses-based) spice cake. Entomologists try to distinguish between true flies and other orders by hyphenating the names of true flies (house-fly, horse-fly, crane-fly), but giving the members of other orders unhyphenated names, either with two unconnected words (caddis fly, alder fly) or with a single, concatenated name (dragonfly, stonefly). Substantial mould collections are held at the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń, Poland and the Bread Museum in Ulm, Germany. The word "fly" also refers to insects of various orders other than Diptera. Gingerbread moulds often displayed the "news", showing carved portraits of new kings, emperors, and queens, for example.

For more information, see Maggot therapy. A significant form of popular art in Europe, major centers of gingerbread mould carving included Lyon, Nürnberg, Pest, Prague, Ulm, and Toruń. Through the ages maggots have been used in medicine in order to clean out necrotic wounds. Another variant uses a boiled dough that can be molded like clay to form inedible statuettes or other decorations. Maggots are bred commercially, as a popular bait in angling, and a food for carnivourous pets such as reptiles or birds. These, covered with a variety of candies and icing, are a common Christmas decoration. Some maggots are leaf miners. A variant dough is used to make gingerbread houses à la the "witch's house" encountered by Hansel and Gretel.

Various maggots cause damage in agricultural crop production, including root maggots in rapeseed and midge maggots in wheat. Gingerbread cookies are often cut into shapes, particularly gingerbread men. By use of this data, plus other signs, the approximate time since death can be estimated by forensic scientists. As a cookie, gingerbread can be made into a thin, crisp cookie (often called a ginger snap) or a softer cookie similar to the German Lebkuchen. These measure about 2-3 days, 3-4 days, and 4-6 days (for average houseflies or bottleflies) since the eggs were laid. Gingerbread is a sweet that can take the form of a cake or a cookie in which the predominant flavor is ginger. An instar I is about 2-5 mm long; instar II 6-14 mm; instar III 15-20 mm.

Maggot identification uses a classification called "Instar" stages. At the height of the summer season, a generation of flies (egg to adult) may be produced in 12-14 days. The size of the house fly maggot is 9.5-19.1mm (3/8 to 3/4 inch). By their stage of development, these maggots can be used to give an indication of the time elapsed since death, as well as the place the organism died.

Some types of maggots found on corpses can be of great use to forensic scientists. The eggs are laid in decaying flesh, animal dung, or pools of stagnant water - whatever has ample food for the larva. The fly life cycle is composed of four stages: egg, larva (commonly known as a maggot), pupa, adult. .

In addition to being an essential part of the food chain, some species of flies spread pollen, hasten the decomposition of plants, animals, and dung, and, in the case of about 5000 species of Tachina flies, eat other insects. The horse-fly eats bits of flesh torn off of its prey, mosquitoes feed on blood and nectar, and the housefly eats a semi-digested liquid created by mixing-enzyme rich saliva with its food. The diet of flies varies heavily between species. A few, like Ormia ochracea, have very advanced hearing organs.

Some flies have very accurate 3D vision. The compound eyes of flies are composed of thousands of individual lenses and are very sensitive to movement. Flies rely heavily on sight for survival. The larva of a fly is commonly called a maggot.

Other flies, such as the horse-fly (Family Tabanidae), can inflict painful bites. The house-fly (Musca domestica) and mosquito are particularly common amongst humans. Flies are common amongst humans and some can cause the spread of serious diseases. These typically have one pair of true wings, with the hind wings modified into halteres.

As defined by entomologists, a fly (plural flies) is any species of insect of the order Diptera. alder fly, Dobson fly, and fish fly: Megaloptera. scorpionfly and hangingfly: Mecoptera. sawfly: Hymenoptera:Tenthredinidae.

mayfly: Ephemeroptera. stonefly: Plecoptera. butterfly: Lepidoptera. dragonfly and damselfly: Odonata.

caddis fly: Trichoptera. firefly: Coleoptera:Lampyridae.