Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors

I am convinced fruit flies are some sort of multidimensional being. I will sit in a room, observe three fruit flies in the air, swat and kill those three fruit flies, then sit back and observe no change in the number of flies in the air.<p>They either throw out decoys when you swat them to fool us, or there’s a large queue of them waiting to take their turn to keep the number flying constant

I&#x27;ve been growing carnivorous plants for more than 15 years and own a business selling them. I can assure you these Sarracenia will not do anything against your fruit flies problem. Pinguicula or Drosera will catch more of them and can actually grow indoors all year round given enough light. But even then, they&#x27;re not really good at pest control.<p>Sarracenia are outdoors plants, they need a ton of direct sunlight and a seasonal rest in winter. They already look light deprived in your pictures.

For anyone contending with the menace of fruit flies or gnats (and especially if you own a fair number of indoor plants), I could not recommend these more wholeheartedly:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Stingmon-Pack-Sticky-Fruit-Fungus&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07XLM4FWL&#x2F;ref=mp_s_a_1_7_sspa" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Stingmon-Pack-Sticky-Fruit-Fungus&#x2F;dp&#x2F;...</a><p>It&#x27;s essentially a better looking version of fly paper. They&#x27;re easy to place alongside indoor plants. Fruit flies and gnats are attracted to decaying organic matter and the moist soil of indoor plants is an often overlooked oasis for them. Gnats are more likely to hang out in indoor potted soils (especially if overwatered) because they feed on fungus, but fruit flies can take refuge there too.<p>A couple years back I had a months long battle with fruit flies. Kitchen was always clean, garage sealed up tight, no indoor compost, I used apple vinegar traps of all styles but nothing solved the problem until I placed those sticky paper inserts at the base of all my indoor plants. Within a week the fruit flies were gone.

The best method is to put a bit of fruit peel and some beer or wine or vinegar at the bottom of a glass (e.g. a pint glass) and then fashion a cone out of paper, where the wide end of the cone is the same size as the mouth of the glass. Cut the pointy end so it’s a few millimeters wide. Insert pointy end first, and tape the wide end of the cone to the brim of the glass, forming a seal. Flies will enter the glass via the opening in the point of the cone, and will be unable to leave. This will collect huge numbers of them with zero maintenance.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.<p>When I was a child, I liked lizards, rats, and frogs as pets, and I also enjoyed the occasional Venus Flytrap from the nursery. I considered some pitcher plants recently, but I had to weigh their effectiveness against cockroaches, and the need to build a whole tropical environment with lights, heat and humidity.<p>Lastly, that brand of essential oil is the same one I purchase, and it&#x27;s great. I use them in a diffuser.

Everyone knows that fruit flies spontaneously generate.<p>My preferred method to get rid of them is with a black hole: I put a couple of pieces of fruit into my homemade Superconducting Apricot Collider, set it on high and then place the resulting black hole right above the compost bin. Works every time. Just be careful with the black hole because if you drop them they fall all the way to the center of the earth and are rather difficult to retrieve.

Fungus gnats are also an issue if you keep indoor plants.<p>I recently discovered that you can water your plants with mosquito dunks in the water, which will put the bacteria (aka: BTI, bacillus thuringiensis strain BMP 144) contained in the dunks into the soil. The bacteria then paralyze the larvae growing in the soil and they die.<p>Doing even more research, it seems there is a newer strain of the bacteria (AM 65-52) that you can buy in 16lbs! buckets for $570 off Amazon (or people have broken it into smaller batches on ebay).<p>This stuff really works like magic. Once the adults die off, no more appear.<p>Gnatrol Biological Larvicide Fungus Larvae

I know the author, quite correctly, rules Venus flytraps out, but for the sake of argument:<p>I used to keep some just for the sake of it, not at all to hunt bugs because that won&#x27;t scale. In humid Buenos Aires, I tried both indoors and outdoors and... they are pretty hard to keep, aren&#x27;t they?<p>You must water them lightly with distilled water. You must NOT let them flower (it&#x27;s hard to overstate this, but it&#x27;s true and I verified it first hand: the plant sprouts a single flower once a year, and if you don&#x27;t prevent this by cutting the stalk ASAP, a single ugly white flower will sprout, and then your flytrap will die of exertion). You must not overfeed it. If it catches a bug on its own, chances are the &quot;trap&quot; will turn black and rot.<p>They seem to be very hard to keep outside their natural swamp environment...

My favorite way to tackle this is to use a bowl of bait and one of those cheapo bug zapper rackets.<p>I take the racket and use a rubber band around the button to keep it &quot;on&quot; and then set the racket above a bowl of whatever bait I need to use.<p>I leave it there until the zaps finally stop.<p>Has yet to fail me in clearing out a fly infestation.

5% acetic acid vinegar, a squirt of lemon dish soap and a few tablespoons of sugar mixed together in a bowl kills the fruit flies within a day of arrival. It will evaporate over time but adding water back to the original level reconstitutes the trap and it will work for months. This is just an interim solution until the lasers and machine vision are working.

Depends on your home&#x27;s location, I guess. I don&#x27;t have fruit flies.<p>Where I am, pantry moths are the problem. One of the few genuinely useful ideas I&#x27;ve ever gotten off NextDoor is this: Dr. Killigan&#x27;s Premium Pantry Moth Traps with Pheromones.<p>The pheromones attract the moths, and the glue makes them stick to it and die. You can put it out of site in a cabinet, and after a few weeks it&#x27;s covered with dead moths.

He mentions apple cider vinegar and dish soap. It&#x27;s worked well for me too but there are always a few flies that aren&#x27;t as interested in the concoction so yea only a 90% solution. I&#x27;ve also found that many of these flies come in from the grocery store in things like strawberries so we&#x27;re careful to check before they enter. Good article - would love to try these plants.

I&#x27;m afraid I take a much cruder approach. We have a fruit fly infestation every summer, and besides keeping fruit and other food out of their reach, I simply hunt them down. Nearly every summer our walls are a graveyard of hundreds of drosophila corpses. (Though I haven&#x27;t seen many of them yet this summer.)<p>Unfortunately they leave ugly spots on our walls and ceilings, and most walls are not that easy to clean, so I developed a couple of techniques where I don&#x27;t squash them on the wall: I slap my hands together just above where they&#x27;re sitting, they see my hands move and fly up, just between my hands. Timing takes some practice, but I&#x27;ve had thousands of opportunities to perfect this technique.<p>Our kitchen wall has been treated to make it easy to clean, so there I just squash them against the wall, which is much easier.

This is how we won our war on fruit flies:<p>- repot all plants after rinsing all soil from them<p>- use leca balls instead of soil and water the plants with a water + fertilizer solution (this is what they do for office plants and why they have stickers saying “do not water”)<p>- all incoming fruits and vegetables soak in water + vinegar for 20–30 min as this kills any eggs (they’ll also last longer because they don’t spoil as fast)<p>- have bug screens on any window that we keep open (they don’t come standard in Europe)<p>- the fruit basket is also enclosed in a bug screen for good measure<p>I believe fruit flies mostly came through grocery store fruits (eggs on the fruits) and then hatched and went to live in the houseplants soil where they’d eat the roots.

I have some very happy pitcher plants in the window over my sink for just this reason. I&#x27;ve been meaning to pick up some Triantha occidentalis as well, a newly discovered carnivorous plant. Well the plant is not newly discovered, but it took doping fruit flies with N-15 and monitoring nutrient uptake to prove that it is metabolizing insects.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1073&#x2F;pnas.2022724118" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1073&#x2F;pnas.2022724118</a>

We bought a cheap standalone bug zapper and put it on the counter and it has been a life saver for the fruit flies. Ours come from bananas, we think, and washing them after bringing them home from from the store seems to help some too.<p>The best part is, working from our offices in separate rooms, my wife and I will hear a zap and both shout &quot;Good job bug zapper!&quot;

I had a fruit fly (or some kind of fly) issue a while back. Couldn&#x27;t figure out where they were coming from or why. For some reason, I pulled the rubber ring out from my kitchen sink&#x27;s garbage disposal. It was the nastiest thing, covered in goop. Cleaning that and the area in the disposal it sat in solved the problem.

I occasionally get drain flies in the shower, but this time I have a Spider In Residence. I previously had a pretty good working relationship with a shower spider: I would do a series of thumps to indicate I was about to turn on the shower. I would leave a couple of drops of water on the shower insert&#x27;s top edge. I would fling various bugs into its web. We had a basic understanding. It died, sadly.<p>The new Shower Spider is doing alright, and it occurs to me that there&#x27;s this complex web of life: my hair in the drain, some kind of fungus is in there growing on it, drain flies eating the fungus and flying up, they are caught by the spider, which then makes a web to catch more flies. So the matter that was once my hair enters the cycle of life and ends up above me in a spider web.

If none of the low-tech hacks in here seem to work, or you have the same kind of gadget addiction as me, I can recommend the &quot;Katchy&quot; brand of bug catchers. They work at night with UV light, and have decimated the fruit fly population in my kitchen.

You don&#x27;t have to kill them. This reusable live trap works very good: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hagglezon.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;s&#x2F;frubby" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hagglezon.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;s&#x2F;frubby</a>

I&#x27;ve done some experimentation in my time, and in my experience fruit flies positively love actively ongoing fermentation! So I&#x27;ve settled one a mixture with sugar and yeast in addition to water, surfactant and vinegar or cider.<p>Also, trapping the little bastards is more efficient if you cover the container with cling foil and poke a hole in the middle. They&#x27;ll easily get in by following the gradient of the escaping molecules, but finding the exit seems to be so much more difficult.

1. Glass jar with less than 1cm deep apple cider and a tiny bit of dishwasher soap, then cover the opening with that pesky plastic foil nobody likes. Poke some holes with a toothpick. 2. Shake a bit to release the cider aroma. Leave near fruit and other edibles which are covered with fruit fly eggs already when you bought them. 3. ??? 4. Profitz!!1!

My low tech but effective technique is: put a very little red wine in a wine glass (preferably stemless); flies will quickly congegrate. When there&#x27;s enough (your judgement, for me 15 or more) very slowly place a plastic yogurt lid over the glass. Then put the whole thing in the freezer for 30minutes. They&#x27;ll be dead, rinse and repeat. No muss no fuss.

All these solutions are mean, fruit flies don&#x27;t do any harm.<p>In the winter I kind of like them cos I don&#x27;t have a chance to see insects.<p>Also let me wax a bit poetic and say how much of a miracle a little thing like a fruit fly is. How long will it be before a &#x27;startup&#x27; can make a flying robot of the same size and intelligence? (my bet is on....never)

Has anyone tried CO2?<p>The idea: Deep trash can for the tasty banana peels. Flood the trash can with CO2. CO2 is heavier than air. If the trash can is deep enough maybe a sufficiently high concentration can be maintained without too frequent flooding.<p>The attractive smell should still be noticeble for the flies. And the environment around the trash of their desires is deadly.

Does anyone else think that practices in the food industry have gotten more careless?<p>The amount of fruit flies has definitely increased in the past two decades. Recently I also had food moths for the first time and strange little black bugs after buying cane sugar.<p>Apart from a <i>moderate</i> amount of fruit flies, I never had any of these a decade ago.

Cinnamon powder works, but use a mask when putting a lot out. I got a sinus infection from putting it in all my houseplants

<i>a splash of apple cider vinegar</i><p>I love that the adage &quot;you catch more flies with honey than vinegar&quot; is literally false.

Sounds like a lot of work. Once we had a fruit fly problem and I read several guides on how to deal with them.<p>Each evening after cleaning up and taking out the trash, I’d whip out the vacuum arm without attachment and send the swarm to their doom. Believe I had to do it three times over a week or so, then it was done.

We use the little vinegar traps but sometimes you just have to go in there with the vacuum cleaner hose set to high power and suck up as many as possible. That will give you a few hours respite to use your kitchen until the next day when theyll be back at full power.

Bought some pitcher plants about 2.5 years ago, water with regular tap water and keep some grow lights over them in the kitchen and we haven’t had any real fly problems ever since. They’ve actually overgrown a bit and we need to transplant them soon!

Fruit flies are easy to manage but these monsters: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sciaridae" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sciaridae</a>

Why distilled water? It presumably doesn&#x27;t rain distilled water outside.

It&#x27;s not as interesting as keeping a bunch of carnivorous plants, but I wonder if the author considered just keeping the compost in the freezer. No smells, no bugs.

Just been in a holiday cottage out on the exposed dales in the English peaks. And by about day four we had fruit flies. Sometimes I think they emerge from the bananas.

&gt; They congregate around the compost bin and the fruit bowl (where there are always lots of bananas).<p>That’s just what happens when you leave fruit and food scraps out.

Any tip to ban regular flies? I hate those with my all heart. Possibly in a non disgusting way? (i.e. jar filled with dead flies to display..)

A cup with a vinegar, soap mix does the trick for the small flys

Who is Audrey and how did she hurt this person?

I just let them be. It’s fun to watch them.

Just buy some spiders and let them loose.

I’m very tempted to try this!

I can’t attest to the recurring source of fruit flies of OP but they come primarily from fully grown herbs sold in supermarkets in Finland. I’ve found being vigilant and simply hoovering them up with a handheld Dyson is enough over the course of a few days to get rid of the infestation. Of course, be vigilant with hygiene during this period.