Steve Scott, age 10, of Mundelein, Illinois, for his question:

Do flies hibernate?

There are a few flies around in the winter. But the major squadrons appear in the spring and continue to pester us all through the summer months. The world has hundreds of different fly species and in the tropics and semi tropics even the pesky houseflies are out and about through the entire year. In temperate and cooler zones, almost all the cringed adults perish with the first frost. A few females may hibernate and come forth to lay eggs in the spring.

This is when multiplication begins on a grand scale. The average female lays 500 little white eggs in the nearest pile of trashy garbage. In 12 hours or so, they hatch into hungry maggots. They feast and grow for four or five days. For the next four or five days they sleep through a pupa state. Then they emerge as full grown adults all ready to start the cycle again. If all of them lived and multiplied, by fall that original fly would have more than five million million descendants.