Oh No, Not Bots!

(I'll start with apologizing for potentially blurry pictures.  Not the best angle, lighting, etc for a cell phone camera when you are crouched next to a horse, leaning slightly into the underbelly danger zone and trying to be quick about it all the while hoping the horse doesn't move.)

Recently, there was an evening when I brought horses in from the pastures to put them in stalls for the night and feed them dinner, and I saw this on the inside of one of Poetess's front legs:

 

BOT EGGS!

Oh no, not bots!  I quickly checked her other legs, and yep, the other front leg had eggs attached to the hairs too.  Which meant, without a doubt, that the time of year the bot flies are out laying eggs had come.

What are bots and why does it matter if they put eggs on the horses' legs?  Bots are a fly that, as an adult, do not eat.  They only mate, lay eggs, and die.  It is the eggs that are the problem.

Eggs are laid on certain parts of the horses bodies, parts that the horse can reach with it's mouth--say, to rub an itch, or to smack at a different fly that is biting them.  When those eggs are rubbed by the horse's mouth, they come off and are ingested. Once ingested, they hatch, and the larvae dwell in the horse's digestive system as parasites.

As we all know, parasite = bad.

Which means that it is imperative to removed those eggs as soon as I discover them.  The less chance of the horse ingesting them the better.

So, I dug around in the tack room and pulled out my trusty pumice-like bot block.  A bot block is used, with some pressure, in the direction of the hair growth to scrape off those bot eggs.

Bot block employed.

If the horse stands still, and standing still no matter what I'm doing to them is an important skill I teach my horses, it really only takes a couple of minutes to remove those pesky bot eggs.

Leg free of bots once more.

PHEW! Potential crisis averted.  (Crisis being intestinal worms to get rid of, which are much harder to reach than eggs on legs.)

I checked each horse, and did need to do some scraping with the bot block on the other horses too, some as much as Poetess, some less.  A quick daily check has, so far, found no more eggs deposited.  Thankfully this 'season' (botflies) is typically only a few weeks, which means I only have to be diligent in checking for eggs for a little longer.