How to Get Rid of Those Pesky Summer Fruit Flies
It’s a common problem: You walk into your kitchen one day to find it buzzing with pesky little fruit flies zipping about your fruit bowl, or worse, floating lifeless in your guest’s glass of red wine. You’re not a slob, and you don’t leave your doors open, so where the heck do these things come from and why? And more important, how do you kill them? Well, worry not. Here are tried and true methods on how to get rid of fruit flies.
Eric Jang is a research entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Hawaii. He studies fruit flies, mainly tephritid fruit flies, which are found on all fruits and vegetables in the field throughout the world. They are different from Drosophila, commonly known as vinegar flies or fruit flies. Whereas tephritid fruit flies attack the good, fresh fruit growing on vines and trees — causing devastation to food production commodities worldwide — vinegar flies, Jang says, are pests of decomposing matter, such as compost piles and rotting bananas in fruit bowls.
Common house fruit flies have an incredibly short life span. In just a week, the eggs turn from larvae to pupae to adults. That’s why it always seems as though they show up out of nowhere in your kitchen.
Preventing Fruit Flies
Seal your doors and windows. No, the flies aren’t spawning magically in your home. The flies enter your home from the outside when you open a door, or through poorly sealed screens on your windows. Or, if you like to buy overly ripe fruit, it could already have fruit fly eggs in it when you bring it home from the grocery store. The point is, it’s important to make sure your home is properly sealed — no splits in window screens, for example.
Put a lid on compost bins. To control fruit flies in your house, it’s best to cover the odors of ripening fruit. This means, among other things, keeping a lid on your compost bin. Jang says in Hawaii, many homeowners use an empty and cleaned-out 2-quart container for ice cream. “You can even use contact paper to make it nice looking,” he says. “But the point is to minimize exposure, so you want to keep the lid on and take the compost out regularly and bury it at least 6 inches deep in your compost pile.”
Cover fruit bowls and plates. As for fruit bowls, Jang recommends fine mesh covers that go right over your bowl, or using glass containers. The latter is a bit more decorative, as shown in the photo here, but you can find domed mesh covers in different colors for just a few dollars each.
Getting Rid of Fruit Flies
Set traps. Fruit when green doesn’t produce the same odor as ripening fruit. Fruit flies go crazy for ripening bananas, which give off amino acetate. Vinegar and red wine also seem to be strong lures. Some big-box stores, such as Walmart, sell small traps for catching fruit flies, but Jang says there are numerous easier ways to solve the issue based on the three readily available food products mentioned above.
Vinegar solution. Jang recommends punching a few holes about two-thirds of the way up a plastic water bottle and adding ⅓ cup of a solution of water with 10 to 20 percent vinegar mixed in. The flies are attracted to the smell of vinegar — hence the name — and will enter the bottle and get trapped in the water and eventually drown.
Red wine. Houzz user Norah Jackson suggests pouring some red wine into a ramekin, covering it with plastic wrap secured with an elastic band and poking holes in the top with a toothpick. The flies enter and either drown or can’t find their way out and die. “I’ve tried other vinegars,” she says. “But nothing works as well as red wine.” Doesn’t seem like such a bad way to go to me.
Vinegar and dish soap. Urbana designer Ellen Crystal fills a jar with wine or vinegar and a touch of dish soap, then covers it with foil and punches holes in the top. Houzz user Melanie Zimmermann recommends pouring apple juice and vinegar in a dish, adding a couple of drops of dish soap and replacing every few days.
A drop of dish soap in the mixture helps break the surface tension of the water, Jang says. Sometimes insects can land on top of water and fly away without sinking. Dish soap breaks that surface tension so they fall right through.
Most of all, just don’t panic. Fruit flies are pretty much harmless. “There’s nothing to worry about,” Jang says. “Mainly, they’re just pests, but luckily they’re easy to control."