Invasion of the fruit fly! HELP!

[IamLoved]

Hi!

We have so many fruit flies in our house and it is driving me cazy! :eek:

How do you guys prevent and/or get rid of these pesky things?

Thanks

[lodestar]

easy...

one C. water
2 T. Sugar (if you have any)
1 T. vinegar
a squirt of liquid detergent

presto---they're history!

[dreamrawalwz]

easy...

one C. water
2 T. Sugar (if you have any)
1 T. vinegar
a squirt of liquid detergent

presto---they're history!

Stupid question, but do you squirt the flies or the counters so they land on them?

[IamLoved]

Not a stupid question, I was wondering the same thing.

Also they are landing on my fruit (obviously) and my fridge, the baskets the fruit is in, everything really. They are so annoying! So do I spray down everything?

[Sharon in Colorado]

Somebody told me they are coming from inside the fruit.

I've had some very ripe bananas that are exposed on top because the stem fell off. The fruit flies keep going there!

I've scattered bay leaves around and they help a little.

but I think there's not much we could do aside from putting them in the fridge.

[Graciebeliever]

The liquid should be out in a open bowl or dish near the fruit.

I do it by a vacuum! Hose attatchment of course HAHAHA

I just hit them when they cluster together and I sneek up on em!

SUUUUUUCk gone :)

hehe

[Tirza]

It is my understanding that the eggs are on the fruit. You can imagine how tiny the eggs must be since the flies themselves are very small. They are probably hiding in the stem ends and the rougher parts of the fruits and washing and scrubbing all that fruit with soap as soon as you bring it home would be very impractical and would cause some things to rot faster. What a merry-go-round....

...and why is it that they seem to get more prevalent later in the season? Is it because you first bring in the fruit with the eggs on it, then they hatch, then they lay eggs everywhere in your house, which causes the population explosion? ICK

Our first line of defense: We do need to make sure to take care of any fruit that is ripening. Once well ripened, before it is in any danger of rotting, it could go in the fridge or freezer. I take care of my bananas that way. I always try to keep unripe ones around to ripen for the smoothies but once they get brown spots on them, not mushy, and I have more than I can use that day, I put them in the freezer right away. That way they are available for smoothies as well as ice cream. If I have a peach or something oozing juice onto the dish, I clean the whole dish, and take care of the bruising which you can't always see when it is first brought home. The nectar from that is a real fly magnet. So is the kitchen garbage. If I can't get rid of it right away, I tie the bag up.

I have tried putting stuff out in dishes, but they always seem to go for the fruit instead. I have tried putting plastic with little holes over the dish, hoping to trap them with no success. And I don't have a vacuum with a hose, just an upright. I must say that my bug population in any form has greatly reduced this year since I have well-maintained screens on the windows and a bug-zapper right outside the most-used door to the house. But I still have some fruit flies inside. Not as many though now that I am keeping more on top of it as described above.

So, for this nice recipe that was posted, I am still waiting to hear how it is applied too...

[Juicyfruit]

I put the mixture mentioned above in a jar or container with a small opening and they can't get out. It works great. Mine were gone in a day. I leave it sitting next to my trash can. :D

[blessed]

:D I use to have the same problem, could not eat for them getting to the food first :)
Now when i bring fruit into the house the first thing i do is wash them under water and dry them, i usually don't have any flies at all and if i do it's only a couple flying around and they soon leave. Where the go i don't know but they disappear.
They come from the store and now i am happy to not have them around.

Ann :D

[IamLoved]

Hi,

Thanks to everyone for responding.

Eariler I grabbed my vacuum from downstairs, lugged it up to the kitchen and started sucking away. The children laughed and laughed at me chasing the fruit flies with the vacuum hose. :D The only problem was that the suction on the hose wasn't very strong so it didn't work as well as I hoped.

so...
What kind of a jar or container do you use that they can't fly out of? :confused: They are so small it seems like they could fly out of anything.


Thanks!

[Sharon in Colorado]

Maybe stick a funnel in the jar, they won't get out that way for sure.

[juliebove]

I've had them twice. Once in CA and once here in WA. In CA, I had narrowed it down to either tomatoes or bananas. The store where I normally shopped had the bananas and tomatoes displayed back to back. At home, I had a banana tree with a little basket under it to store the tomatoes. In the store and at my house, I could see them flying all around the bananas and the tomatoes. Then another customer at the store advised me not to buy the bananas there because of the fruit flies. Aha! What I did was to put my tomatoes in the fridge for a couple of weeks and we just did without the bananas until the fruit flies were gone. I also scrubbed the counter very well and made sure to to take the trash out often and not let it accumulate. We still continued to have the fruit flies for a couple of weeks. But then there were none. After that I only bought bananas at stores other than that one.

Here, we have two apple and two pear trees. When we first bought this house, not quite two years ago, apples and pears had dropped from the trees and had fallen onto the ground rotting. They attracted fruit flies who in turn flew into the house via a broken screen in the kitchen door. I then repaired the screen using a piece of clear packing tape on either side. It wasn't a hole in the screen, but more like a piece of the screen had come loose. That was really the only way I could think of to fix it without putting a new piece of screen in. I didn't want to do that because I really just need a new door.

Prior to that I'd bought these little fruit fly traps. They probably contain the same sort of sweet/soapy liquid described in other posts. I even went so far as to buy a decorative soapstone holder for one of the traps! The traps are little while plastic trinagular things with a hole in the middle. They were supposed to lure the fruit flies into the middle where they would fall in and drown. Ah, but no! I seemed to have really smart fruit flies. I'd see them go into the traps, drink the fluid and come right back out. The only ones who actually drowned were the ones I managed to poke inside. And even then they didn't always drown like they were supposed to. When I eventually threw the traps out, I cut them open to see how many bugs actually got inside. It was little to none.

I'd also discovered fruit flies in the bathroom! What I learned upon investigating is that they are attracted not only to fruit but to sources of water. That means sinks, potted plants and any sources of standing water. I have several house plants. I began rinsing the leaves well in the sink and making sure not to overwater them. I also cleaned up any debris around the plants like falling blossoms or dead leaves. I stopped leaving any fruit out on the counter. I bought a refrigerated fruit bowl. They are no longer being made now. Apparently they didn't work as well as advertised, but mine served me well for over a year. No more fruit flies!

But this past month, my daughter went to dance camp. Food is not normally allowed in the dressing rooms at the dance studio, but they made an exception during the camps since there we so many kids eating lunch. Soon the place was teeming with fruit flies. The girls were not careful to use the trash and they'd leave half eaten apples and things out on the benches between classes. Or paper bags with extra food left in there until the following day. That was all it took!

[Tirza]

...The store where I normally shopped had the bananas and tomatoes displayed back to back...another customer at the store advised me not to buy the bananas there because of the fruit flies....
Yes, my hubby noticed fruit flies around bananas etc. at the place we shop. I think it is because they don't clean the display stands properly, just keep loading on fruit day after day, and it gets overripe.... A periodic cleaning would likely fix it.

Those are usually the "No Frills, Price Chopper" sort of places. I guess if they knew people weren't buying because of it, they would (might?) make the effort to keep it clean in order to keep their customers.

[juliebove]

Yes, my hubby noticed fruit flies around bananas etc. at the place we shop. I think it is because they don't clean the display stands properly, just keep loading on fruit day after day, and it gets overripe.... A periodic cleaning would likely fix it.

Those are usually the "No Frills, Price Chopper" sort of places. I guess if they knew people weren't buying because of it, they would make the effort to keep it clean in order to keep their customers.

The store I used to shop at in NY was overrun with fruit flies. There was very little in the way of fresh produce I would buy there because of it. Then things got really bad when we had that power outage for two weeks. They shut the store down but left all the produce there on the shelves. And can you believe they actually still tried to sell some of it after two weeks? They also tried to get away with selling some meat, cheese, frozen foods, etc. Gak! My daughter and I went in there once the power came back on, hoping to find something edible. The health dept. was all over that place. They had to remove every speck of produce and totally scrub down the shelves. That took care of the problem, for a while anyway.

I used to work at K Mart. Back then we sold a few grocery items, but no fresh produce. We also sold pet food. We began having a problem with maggots in the pet food. We traced it to a particular type of bird seed with bits of fruit in it. What we had to do was periodically clear all the food from the shelves and really scrub them down. Of course this was in addition to checking all new shipments for possible problems.

I do get annoyed when I go to a store and discover that they've moved all their produce around. But I shouldn't. Because this tells me that they've probably also scrubbed all the displays down as well.

[Pailani]

I've always used a tiny bit of detergent in a glass of vinegar or wine. I started one yesterday and I've already got 18 fruit flies in there. The one I did a few days ago caught 30!

[Lay-Lay]

poor fruit flys,their hungry too, LOL!

[ljannise]

I use crunched up Basil leaves. They are pretty good for a lot of pests.

It works for me!!

[Gosia]

I use a jar with a paper cone. Works fine. I release the flies in the garden.

Gosia

PS Not an empty jar, of course, but a jar with some rotting fruit in it!

[Tirza]

I've always used a tiny bit of detergent in a glass of vinegar or wine. I started one yesterday and I've already got 18 fruit flies in there. The one I did a few days ago caught 30!
Whatever happened to catching more flies with honey than with vinegar? ;)

[Live Free]

I use a mason jar with a stiff paper cone in the jar. In the bottom of the jar I pour apple cider vinegar and every few days I release the fruit flies outside and put fresh apple cider vinegar in the bottom of the jar.

It works great for me.

[MendhiGrl]

Wash your bananas as soon as you bring them into the house, then hang them up to dry.

[Pailani]

Whatever happened to catching more flies with honey than with vinegar? ;)

I guess you catch more fruit flies with vinegar than honey! :p

[lodestar]

i used to fuss with a cone...now just use an open glass or shallow dish, and presto...eliminated!

[IamLoved]

Thank you so much, all of you, for you help!

I did a major clean up this morning in my kitchen. I stuck all the fruit (even the bananas) in the fridge and wiped everything down with bleach water. (I know, bleach is not terribly healthy but it does a good job cleaning, and I actually like the way it smells, call me crazy!)

Our vacuum cleaner is still ot sucking well so my 5 year old son suggested I check to see if the bag is full. It was. But we didn't have any more vacuum bags and I really wanted to suck those things up so I cleaned out the bag by hand into the trash can (this took about 20-30 minutes). After this was done I was ready to suck up those pesky fruit flies. Alas, my vacuum still is not sucking. I don't know what the problem is!

I don't have any white sugar in the house. Will brown sugar work? I have a tiny tiny bit of that.

Thanks again to all of you!

[Pailani]

I don't have any white sugar in the house.

I've always used wine or vinegar without sugar and it's always worked.

[Sharon in Colorado]

I save the empty glass jars from salsas, pasta sauces, nut butters, applesauce etc. So what I did was place the solution in the jar and punch out a small hole in the metal lid for the little guys to fly into. I tried using a funnel at first but wasn't stable and I needed my funnel.

It works - there are several fruit flies in all the jars I've placed by the fruit baskets and houseplants!

[girlsmiley]

In my SAD days I never had problems with fruit flies because I didn't eat much fruit (or veggies). Now my house is full of good fruit and veggies and, unfortunately, fruit flies. However, I knew I'd seen some way to get rid of them ... so I did a search and found this thread ...


easy...

one C. water
2 T. Sugar (if you have any)
1 T. vinegar
a squirt of liquid detergent

presto---they're history!

Wow, I am amazed ... although I did not add sugar, I put apple cider vinegar in some water and some liquid dish soap ... and voila! This morning there are a lot of dead fuit flies! I don't really understand how it works ... I know they are attracted to the vinegar smell (rotting fruit) yet why the liquid detergent? Do they sip the "juice" and die from the detergent?

I love this place! :D

[LisaDS88]

I use a mixture of water, dish soap, and apple cider vinegar. They fly right into it and drown. I just put a new "trap" out last night have about 60 or more dead flies in it right now with a bunch more buzzing around soon to commit suicide.

[yeahbethany]

Someone asked this on another board once, and Doug Graham said that fruit flies will only invade in the presence of damaged fruit (bruised, broken, etc).

So:
-keep your garbage/compost covered and take it out every day

-inspect fruit daily and cover/eat any damaged fruit.

Health and Fitness week was amazing - hundred of pounds of fruit in the kitchen, not a fruit fly in sight...

Hope this helps!

[Bethanie]

I decided to stop leaving wet dishes in the sink and after using all sinks to wipe them dry before going off at night to bed also i started placing my veggies in brown paper bags the heavy ones.
It seems that if they can't smell the food they don't hang around, kind of out of sight out of mind, just don't forget you have your food in the bags or it may rot.
When i would leave food out in view i had a real problem with them but know they are looking for the food and can't find it, it kind of funny because a few days ago we saw a line of flies sitting on top of our t.v. which is on top of our fridge, just sitting there like they were scouts looking for the food so they could summon the troops. :) :)
We can prepare food now with more peace, sometimes we see one or two but nothing like it use to be.
Hope this helps.
Bethanie

[luckitri]

I got them also - don't ever remember having them this bad! Anyway - I washed my produce thoroughly with soap even before setting it out to ripen and in spite of washing I still got them - which lends creedence to Sharon's theory that they are inside the fruit.