Fruit flies are a great nuisance that can ruin your day very quickly. As you are here, it’s safe to assume that you are looking to prevent a fruit fly invasion or get rid of fruit flies from your home quickly. Well, you are in luck today. We will talk about the best tips to get rid of fruit flies from your home efficiently. So wasting any more of your time, let’s get to it.
Though fruit flies don’t pose a serious threat to human health, they are the carriers of a number of diseases and can be super annoying. They are incredibly fast, so don’t bother trying to catch them by hand. Let’s dive into the topic and find out the best tips to get rid of fruit flies from the first sign that they’ve infiltrated your home.
Where do Fruit Flies come from?
A common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is a pesky little insect that feeds on fermenting fruits, vegetables, fermented foods, and other high-fructose substances. They seem to come from nowhere. One day there is only a lone fly roaming around your home one just and within a few days, boom. They’re everywhere. Right?
It’s just that their eggs are too tiny to notice. A single fruit fly (female) can lay up to 500 tiny and unnoticeable eggs at a time on the skin of your ripen fruits. After hatching, the fruit fly larvae feast on their surroundings for a few days and evolve into fully formed adults. That means once you notice one or two flies annoying you, an army is already being prepared to invade your home. So let’s get to our battle stations and prepare for the upcoming tug of war.
Best Tips to Get Rid of Fruit Flies
Once you are ready to drive these pesky little bugs out of your home, it’s time to learn the ways how you can get rid of them and prevent any future infestation. So here goes:
Prevention
Prevention is better than cure, right? Fruit flies can live almost anywhere, not only in your trash cans. The key to preventing a full-scale fruit fly infestation is to cut off the food source. So clean trash bins help? Well, sure, a bit. But to make sure that you fully minimize the risk, try out these hacks:
- Throw out overripe fruit and vegetables
- Check out the garbage disposal system regularly
- Store fruits and veggies in the fridge
- If you spill something containing fruit juice, alcohol, or sugar, clean it up ASAP.
- Wash fruits and veggies as soon as you get home. This will remove any potential eggs or larvae from the fresh fruit/vegetables.
Solution
Let’s say despite all your efforts, you’ve already got an infestation growing. What to do now? Well, there are multiple ways you can get rid of fruit flies from your home. Let’s have a look:
Tip#1 Clean The Environment
When you have an active fruit fly infestation, the first thing you need to do is to clean every square inch of your home. Don’t leave your kitchen trash, food residue open at room temperature. Instead, keep your food scraps in a compost bag and store them in the freezer. Then clean the whole house. Cover your fruits in plastic wrap so flies can’t lay eggs over the skin.
The next part of the job is to identify the fly. It’s crucial because using the wrong solution will not help you to get rid of fruit flies permanently. So how do you recognize one? You can distinguish fruit flies by their characteristically large red eyes.
The next step is to use the fruit fly’s strength against them. A fruit fly can track you down from the store you’ve bought fresh foods to all the way to your house. And they hate some natural fragrances like peppermint, lavender, eucalyptus, lemongrass, and clove. So you can try using deterring scents from confusing the flies.
Tip#2 Use Traps
You can use both DIY handmade traps and store-bought ones to catch and get rid of fruit flies. All the basic fruit fly traps are essentially sweet liquid bait that attracts the flies into a container. And once they enter the container, they can’t get out anymore. The liquid contains a few drops of dish soap. You can use various items like apple cider vinegar, beer, red wine, etc., as bait.
Making a homemade trap is nothing you can’t do. Just use a small jar like a mason jar, and put about a cup of the bait. Then add a few drops of liquid dish soap into the bait. Lastly, make a paper cone and place it on top of the jar. This will make it easy for flies to enter but very difficult to leave before touching the liquid bait. Once the fly touches the liquid, it’s game over. The sope cancels the surface tension of the liquid, and the flies drown. A
Here’s another way to do it. Place a sweet food item inside a container and cover the container with plastic wrap. Next, poke a few holes in the wrap and place the container in a fly-concentrated area. You can also try out a store-bought/commercial trap if you want easy and quick results.
Tip#3 Use Chemical Treatment
There are a lot of insecticides available in the market that can help you solve your fruit fly problem. You can try sprays, powders, and diffusers to use modern insecticides. But our expert team discourages you from doing so. The chemical only offers a temporary solution. And not only that, but the overuse of chemicals can have increased the fruit flies’ tolerance. So they are becoming more and more immune.
On the other hand, traps are the best way to get rid of unwanted fruit flies without increasing the risk factors. A cider vinegar trap or dish soap trap is a lot safer and adequate to help you catch these pesky pests easily.
If Everything Fails
It’s not like you have to call a professional pest control company to catch and eliminate those annoying bugs. The entire infestation is temporary. When the weather starts to cool down a little bit, the flies will stop breeding so much because they can’t survive in colder temperatures. The average lifespan of a fruit fly is about two weeks only. So even if you do absolutely nothing but only clean your house, the fruit flies will eventually die off.
And what’s more? Though these annoying little bugs can make you lose your mind, that’s just about it. They don’t pose serious threats if you don’t live near a garbage dump. So keep your house clean, and you’re gonna do just fine.
Final Words
Though fruit flies only pose mild risks, the trouble they can give you can make you seriously pissed off. But if you know how to repel and destroy their attack, it’ll be a piece of cake (keep it covered in plastic wrap or else…..:P) for you to get rid of these little buggers. Remember, cleanliness is the key.
No more today. I hope this article proves to be helpful to those in need. Please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions with us in the comment section below. I wish you all a pest-free weekend. Thanks for reading this far. Take care and stay safe.