A few things you didn’t know about fleas in Manchester, Warrington, and Cheshire.
1. If you had 500 fleas in your house, the theoretical number
of flea eggs they might lay can be around 20,000, that’s just in three days.
2. The UK’s largest recorded flea infestation of human fleas was on a pig farm in 1987. It reportedly turned an area the size of a tennis court brown. We estimate that to cover an area of that size, this particular flea family must have numbered around 133,378,450!
3. There are around 1300 different types of fleas around the world.
4. The largest flea is a Hystrichopsylla schefferi.
5. Fleas were responsible for one of the greatest changes in the UK’s social history. The Black Rat Flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) was responsible for transmitting what was then called Black Death in the mid-14th century.
6. The male flea sports an organ approximately 2.5 times the length of its own body — the largest, relative to its size, of any insect.
7. The instrument of choice amongst flea musicians worldwide is the ukulele. It was so named in 1878 after a Portugues
e sailor arrived in Hawaii bearing a braguinho – a guitar-like instrument. As he played, the locals thought his fingers as nimble as dancing fleas, or in the Hawaiian language, uke (dancing) lele (flea).
8. Fleas have been used as a notably unsuccessful method of blackmail. In 1996, a trans woman named Lydia Banot was jailed for eight years at the Old Bailey after blackmailing Harrods. The sex-change extortionist had threatened to release a plague of fleas in the designer clothing department unless a demand for £5 million was met. There’s optimism for you.
So remember, if you have fleas, give us a call 0161 776 9832