I have a problem with fruit flies inside my house! Often times I have to keep stone fruits on the counter to ripen, and that’s when the nasty flies start coming in swarms. In addition to my wife’s disgust (and her objection to keeping fruits outside the fridge), the flies do injure the fruit skin and transmit disease, like brown rot, from one fruit to another. I was advised to use apple cider vinegar with a couple of drops of soap; it does work to a certain extent, but is not very effective, it seems the flies are more attracted to the fruits than to the trap. Any one has a better solution?
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Maybe vacuum them out of the air.bb
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Try smearing Tanglefoot on something yellow. Maybe a yellow cup upside down and leave it close to the fruit.
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Are they attracted to color or smell?
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Here is my solution:
The fan runs all the time, it keeps the flies from being able to land.
There is a trap there as well, you can buy these traps and then re bait with sugar and vinegar. It is normally not near the fan so they can get to it.
We tried many things over the years and finally settled on this fan option. Traps alone never worked very well for us.
For the compost bin we also tried many things, now we have biodegradable bags and we just periodically put a new bag in which traps the flies in there below the new bag. We use a large size trash can for the compost.
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They are attracted to the color. But can’t fly away because they get stuck to Tanglefoot.
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Get one of those zappers that look like a tennis raquet. You can find them at the big box stores for under $10. Swing it around in a cloud of flies and snap! snap! snap! listen to them fry. It can actually become addicting. It has solved our fruit fly problem completely.
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Actually this is a good idea. I got one of these because my kids go in and out of the house all the time and at least once a week I get a fly inside the house that won’t land to get hit. So I got one of those rackets on amazon and it works great.
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Place peach pits in a bowl, and vacuum them off with a vacuum hose after they congregate. Also, a pit in a paper lunch bag or soda bottle can be used to trap them. Expensive sticky traps do not seem to work any better than dollar store fly traps. Butter muslin will keep them off your fruit while you trap them. Bleach all your drains/garbage disposal, clean your garbage cans, and check the yard for rotten fruit. They can breed in a few drops of beer left in the bottom of a bottle you were saving for homebrewing purposes. If you trap most of them and starve them at least 3 weeks, you should be in the clear.
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Cool, I had not seen these. I ordered one, not for fruit flies but for other bugs – my family is bugaphobic and maybe they will stop calling me to take care of the bug if they can zap it.
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what always floors me is that mosquito screens in the windows are no good for keeping them out. They seem larger than the screen mesh… anyhow a good low tech method is to leave a watermelon rind in the garbage until ripe, then quickly close the bag and take everything to the trash. I even position the bag edges in the evening so they can be closed quickly in the morning.
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I have used vinegar to get rid of fruit flies for years. You fill a small glass half way to two thirds full, put plastic wrap over top of the glass, put a rubber band around the plastic wrap on the body of the glass so it will stay on the top of the glass then use a toothpick to poke holes in the plastic wrap on the top. The fruit flies crawl into the holes and eventually drown. It has worked for me every time. Sometimes it may require more than one glass.
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You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. <—Not mine.
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The use of a little unscented liquid soap on the vinegar makes any lid or covering unnecessary. It removes the surface tension and the fly cannot take off.
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We drape a tablecloth over our fruits to keep out fruit flies.
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Over the years many hundreds of the fruit flies have been caught here in the kitchen with a simple, cheap, safe trap. Lowes sells the cheap, yellow fly catching coiled ribbons. I uncoil 2 of them and tape a weight at the bottom (hex nut, washers, pennies, whatever) so that they hang straight. I hang them side by side maybe a foot apart, and they are just a few inches above a table/shelf/flat surface where a styro plate sits. I put banana peeling/peach peeling/ banana slices/apple peeling/whatever in the plate. As they fly to and fro around the bait plate, they will usually land on the sticky yellow ribbons pretty soon. I leave the strips there for weeks, but the plate and bait get replaced regularly. In the garage there are LOTS of tiny flying insects that show up in Spring/Summer, and I use the same ribbons, but instead of fruit bait in a plate, I hang the 2 strips from the ceiling and near a wall where a low wattage light is mounted. The light stays on at night in an otherwise dark garage. MANY thousands of tiny insects end up on the strips over the season. Spiders will set up their own sticky trap near the same light to get in on the action.
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This is sort of similar to what we do with the compost bin … it is a built-in fruit bait which is regularly getting freshened. One advantage of using the compost bin as the bait is you don’t need to freshen the bait and you don’t need to have rotting fruit on the counter. But you do need to periodically put a new bag in to cover all the flies in there. If the compost bin was in a closet you might be able to hang the strips above it.
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This is sort of similar to what we do with the compost bin … it is a built-in fruit bait which is regularly getting freshened. One advantage of using the compost bin as the bait is you don’t need to freshen the bait and you don’t need to have rotting fruit on the counter. But you do need to periodically put a new bag in to cover all the flies in there. If the compost bin was in a closet you might be able to hang the strips above it.
Yeah, you can use something that attracts them as a bait. Better place it in a dry warm place, no moisture around. For gnat repelling particularly, many people advise using bait made of overripe fruits like bananas.
I do a lot of fermenting (I make komucha and kefir with fruit throughout the year), so fruit flies are a constant (seasonal) bane. I haven’t found anything that works better than straight apple cider vinegar with soap (white vinegar works too and is cheaper) – I use a small glass and only fill it up about an inch, then a squirt of liquid soap like mentioned above. I place a couple of these cups in the kitchen near my fermentations. For me, this pretty much solves the problem. You have to replenish every couple of days because of evaporation.
A couple things I do: 1) I manually swirl the cups once a day to “freshen” them up. 2) I use germination mats to keep my kombucha at ~81 degrees constant anyway so I place at least one of my cups on the germination mats – it might be in my head, but it seems like the 80 degree traps do a bit better. 3) I move my cups throughout the day to wherever the flies seem to be congregating.
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