You’re at the beach and the sun is pouring down its mid-day rays and you feel a bite on the back of your neck.

“Ow, darn Florida mosquitoes!” Sorry, but salt-marsh mosquities with their long striped legs and either golden-brown or black bodies, rarely attack in the middle of the day and don’t like noon sunlight.

Florida has three blood-sucking flies in the order of Diptera. Besides the mosquitoes, there are those lousy biting midges (also known as sand flies or no-seeums and they love to attack at dawn or dusk. If you are getting attacked in the middle of your beach day, you probably have a stable fly (dog fly) problem.

Stable flies look like a light colored houseflies with a mean temper and bite only in daylight. While they are more common in the warmer months, winter tourists to Florida still have to worry about this biting threesome. And the bad news is that scientists have noted mosquitoes prefer biting people to domestic and farm animals.