If I know nothing else about the climate and entomology, I know this much: It’s been one helluva summer for flies.

Black flies, mosquitos, deer flies — the usual villains. But what wasn’t usual was how many there were. It was so bad that, like something out of a Hitchcock movie, even the houseflies rose to the occasion, taking fiendish liberties — and fiendish bites — out of my delicate corpus.

It’s no secret I’m a hopeless animal lover. In addition to my home menagerie — three dogs, a cat, and a 16-year-old goldfish — I’m one of those fools who fusses over every dog and cat he meets. I’d be overstating it to say I prefer the company of animals to people … but not by much.

Still, even I draw the line, and where I draw it most clearly is between me and biting insects. Simply put, they are the Enemy.

It’s easy enough to identify enemies; it’s a whole ‘nother thing to defeat them. Don’t believe me? Just check our foreign policy for the past 70 years or so. Thing is, no one and no thing can defeat flies. It’s a matter of simple math: A generation of mosquitos is 14 days; for black flies it’s five days. So they, like crooked politicians, are always with us, whether we like it or not. While killing 10 — or 10,000 — is no prob, their numbers will be replenished before you can say “Ouch!”

So if ya can’t beat ’em, what are ya supposed to do — join ’em?

Of course not.

All you can do is try to figure out how best to thwart ’em. Luckily, I figured that out.

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Office chat

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Actually, strictly speaking, I didn’t figure out nuttin’ — it was figured out for me by a woman I run into from time to time in my office (better known as Lakeview Deli). She reads my column, and we often exchange chat about the columns, though I’m sad to say we’ve never exchanged names.

She has a steel-trap memory. Last fall, I wrote about the dearth of cotton long johns for sale in town. A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in the deli, the lady came in, left, then came in again, this time with a paper bag which she handed to me. In it was a union suit her husband had outgrown. Not only a steel-trap memory, but a trap-door memory as well.

Anyhow, sometime in early July, after I’d written another column about the fly problem here, we ran into each other again.

“So, the flies chewin’ you up, are they?” she said.

“You know it,” I said. “I never remember them being this bad. I go out for five minutes and I get devoured.”

“What you need is a bug shirt,” she said.

“A bug shirt?” I said. “What’s that?”

“What I’m wearing,” she said.

I checked it out. It was basically an anorak made of microfiber, with mesh on the sides, and netting that could be zipped over the hood when it was up.

“That work?” I asked.

“You bet,” she said. “I’ve had them for years. This is my second one.”

I’m not easily pursuaded by the average person’s recommendations, but this was no average person — she was a regular reader of my column. As far as I’m concerned, that and that alone confers instant credibility.

“So where do you get them?” I said.

“Sturdy’s,” she said.

And that was it. Mere minutes after we’d said our goodbyes, I zoomed to Sturdy’s and asked Dick Branch about the bug shirts. It turned out he had quite a bit to say about them.

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Hooray for Canada!

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The bug shirts they carried weren’t mere bug shirts; they were, and I quote, “The Original Bug Shirts.” They’re Canadian-made, come in either microfiber or cotton, and have been a staple at Sturdy’s ever since they hit the market. In fact, according to Dick, Sturdy’s is their biggest U.S. customer. Between what Dick and my Lakeview Deli pal told me about their effectiveness, I was sold. Sad to say, though, no shirt was sold. There were none in large, and according to Dick, the medium wouldn’t have been as good a fit, so I left Study’s empty-handed.

Then what?

Then what do you think? I ordered one directly from the company. If there was any chance I could quit being a fly smorgesborg, I was gonna take it. And I had two pressing reasons why I would. One was Dewey Mountain, where I walk my dogs at least twice a day and which was hellish for me, but heavenly for the mosquitos. The other was I was going to the Tanzanian savannah with my family in late August, and from what I’d read, African mosquitos make their Adirondack cousins look like family pets.

As soon as the shirt arrived, I threw it on and headed to Dewey. The result was amazing: The flies buzzed around, but they couldn’t bite through the fabric, nor could they sneak through the cuffs or bottom, which tightened up perfectly. The Original Bug Shirt lived up to its original promise.

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The acid test …

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So our ADK flying fiends were stimied by TOBS, but how about their African counterparts?

I knew all about the flies in Africa — they’re everywhere, all the time, and their bite is somewhere between a hyena’s and crocodile’s. And how could I not know that, having seen innumberable Tarzan movies in my gilded youth.

A note: African mosquitos have an added threat our little rotters don’t — they can carry malaria. In addition to them, there are tsetse flies, which can carry sleeping sickness. So in Africa, the flies’ bite alone would be the least of my worries.

Now another note: Every place we went, the guides assured us: 1) There was no malaria there, and 2) their tsetse flies didn’t carry sleeping sickness. Was that true? Not according to all the available reports. But even if it was true, I still kept taking my anti-malarial meds and wearing my bug shirt.

And now the supreme irony: The African flies were far fewer and far less vicious than our local luminaries. Between TOBS and a few sprays of DEET, I hardly noticed them, much less got chawed on by them.

As for whether the few who bit me carried malaria or sleeping sickness? I keep reminding myself that the folks who told us they didn’t seemed the very picture of honesty. But they also kept reminding me of an old, old joke:

A man’s walking down the street and comes to a house where there’s a man on the porch and a dog in the yard. The dog is staring menacingly at the pedestrian and growling.

“Does your dog bite?” the guy says to the man on the porch.

“Nope,” says the man. “Not at all.”

OK, thinks the guy, if that man says it, it must be true. So he keeps walking, and suddenly the dog launches and chomps on the guy’s butt.

The dog runs off, leaving the guy hopping around in agony.

“You said your dog doesn’t bite!” he yells to the man on the porch.

“He doesn’t,” says the man. “But that ain’t my dog.”