Everyone on the planet is likely to be familiar with the ubiquitous house fly (Musca domestica) belonging to the Muscidae family. These small, grayish flies measure about 4-7.5mm in length with distinctive four dark stripes on their thorax. House flies undergo complete metamorphosis with four life stages: egg, larva (maggot), pupa, and adult, through which the insect can progress in as little as 7-10 days under optimal conditions. Their large compound eyes providing nearly 360-degree vision, and one pair of functional wings with small knobbed structures called halteres for balance during flight make them agile flyers.

• Before they feed, house flies taste with their feet, which are equipped with chemoreceptors that detect sugars, salts, and other chemicals.
• Adults possess a specialized mouthpart, the labella, for sponging up liquid food, and perform "vomit-feeding" by regurgitating digestive enzymes onto solid food to liquefy it, then lapping up the resulting solution.
• Their appetite for both animal waste and human food, accounts for why house flies can be effective vectors for various pathogens.
• House flies can carry over 100 pathogens harmful to humans, including salmonella and E. coli.
• Their larvae, known as maggots, are efficient decomposers and play a role in breaking down organic waste.
• Female house flies can lay up to 500 eggs in their short lifetime (typically 15-30 days), which explains their remarkable population growth.
• A house fly's compound eyes contain approximately 4,000 individual lenses, providing exceptional motion detection but relatively poor image resolution.
• House flies can process visual information up to five times faster than humans, making it tricky to swat them.
• House flies beat their wings approximately 200 times per second, creating their characteristic buzzing sound.

• In ancient Egypt, representations of flies, sometimes of gold, in necklaces may have been used as protective amulets-- presumably against bothersome flies.
• The earliest known mechanical pest control device was the fly swatter, with ornate versions dating back to ancient Egypt, indicating humanity's long battle against these persistent insects.
• In Greek myth, the young girl, Myia, fell in love with Endymion but her chatter disturbed his eternal slumber, angering the moon goddess Selene, who transformed Myia into a fly, who, unfortunately, continues in incessant buzzing .
• The phrase "fly on the wall" derives from the house fly's ability to go unnoticed while observing human activities, becoming synonymous with witnessing events discreetly.
• Flies appear as metaphors in Shakespeare's plays, notably in King Lear ("As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport").
• The title of William Golding's novel "Lord of the Flies," is a reference to Beelzebub, known by that sobriquet, originating from ancient Philistine worship-- later associated with demonology or even a representation of Satan, and thus, in Golding's work, invokes powerful associations with corruption and moral decay as social orders break down.
• One of the closing images of the 1958 sci-fi/horror classic, The Fly, a tale of tragic teleporter trouble, is burned into the memories of many who saw the film in their impressionable youth:

There is a deep-seated  instinct, in human males,  to aim urine at targets. Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport famously features etched fly images in men's urinals, a behavioral design "nudge" created in the 1990s that reduced spillage by 80% by giving users a target to aim at—a simple innovation now widely copied worldwide as an elegant solution to a common problem.
Apis in a crapper: Bugs in the biffy bowl is a long-standing tradition. While flies are classified in the order Diptera, and honeybees and their kin, the wasps and ants, belong to the order Hymenoptera, in late-19th century Great Britain, people would put pictures of bees in urinals and toilets. They served as a target, but also a joke about the pronunciation of the honeybee's genus, Apis.  And yes, in the late-19th century, a London plumbing impresario named Thomas Crapper, although he didn’t invent the flush toilet, improved the design and made a fortune with his line of flush toilets. (However, his name is not the root of our word "crap" which is derived from the Dutch for “to pluck”).
Musca depicta (depicted fly) was a tradition of painting hyper-realistic flies on artworks, particularly common in 15th-17th century religious paintings and still lifes. These trompe l'oeil flies served multiple symbolic functions carrying significant philosophical and theological meaning within Renaissance and Baroque visual culture, including representing mortality (vanitas), sin, corruption, or the devil, while simultaneously showcasing the artist's technical virtuosity in creating convincing illusions. Notable examples include: (at left above) Petrus Christus's "Portrait of a Carthusian" (1446) in which a fly appears to sit on the faux-frame painted around the portrait, (at centre above) Carlo Crivelli's "Madonna and Child" (1480), where a fly rests on the parapet below the Virgin Mary, and (at right above) a portrait of a woman of the Hober family (1470?), subject and artist identities unknown, in which a fly appears to sit on the woman's wimple.