How to get rid of unpleasant fruit flies easily.

We all love fruits and fresh vegetables. We buy fresh fruits and vegetables enough to have them whole week, in order not to bother everyday with buying more. We keep them on the dinner table and face inconvenient result next day. Fruit flies appear all of a sudden. We try to kill them. We try to wash fruits and think that we succeeded but they appear again and again. They appear in jars of jam which were left on the table without cover. Basically we need to do following three things in order to get rid of fruit flies: we need to find and destroy their house; we need to catch those who managed to fly from their house and we need to do perform technics to prevent appearance of new fruit flies.

Let us understand their origin and what they want and we will than succeed in killing them. Fruit flies are mostly spread in rotten fruits or vegetables (apples, pears, onions, potatoes, etc.), boxes of cereals and nuts, opened jar of jam or compote, open box of juice or open bottles with sweet drinks. Female flies are looking for rotting fruit and lay its eggs only in such fruits. Newborn flies are staying and eating only substances which are part of rotting fruit. So we can easily make a conclusion that we got them when we bought fruits. Fruits were possibly touching rotten fruits while they were staying in the warehouses. And one more possible source of eggs of fruit flies is land which we buy for planting our plants at home. We cannot know for sure if fruit which fall from the tree was laying on it. Extremely huge amount of fruit flies appear when you prepare fruit and vegetables to be put in jars in order to preserve them for winter. In such situation you will buy a lot and maybe will not be able to deal with everything in one day. How to save our kitchens clean and home remedies against fruit flies are here for you.

Method number 1: Сatch fruit flies by attracting them with traps
Method number 2: Prevent appearing of fruit flies
Method number 3: Use home remedies
Method number 4: What to do if you don’t have any fruits or vegetables
Video

Method number 1: Catch fruit flies by attracting them with traps

How to catch fruit flies with glass jar:

Take a jar made from glass and put pieces of fruits in it (you can also use a bit of juice).
Make a funnel from the paper.
Make a small hole on the tip of the funnel.
Put the funnel into the jar. Thin entrance should be lower and inside the jar. Join together jar and funnel with glue tape.
Flies will come as they smell fruits inside the jar. They will enter the jar through the funnel but they will not be able to escape as exit will be too narrow and very difficult to find for insects.

How to catch fruit flies with plastic cup:

Take small plastic disposable cup (you can use one from yogurt or something similar).
Put inside some fruit (apple, peach, nectarine, banana) or juice, used tea bags, etc.
Cover top of the plastic cup with plastic wrap.
Using big / thick needle make small holes in plastic wrap (the size of the holes should be small that the fruit fly will be able to come inside but will be not able to come outside).
Put this plastic cup on the spot where they fly more often.
Fruit flies smell fruits and they climb into the cup. But they cannot get out as the holes are too small.
When the number of fruit flies reaches approximately 15 you need throw away the glass to the trash bin outside the apartment.
Repeat the procedure till you will catch all fruit flies.

How to catch fruit flies with plastic bag:

Put few leftovers of apples into the plastic bag.
Fruit flies prefer everything spoiled.
They will climb into the bag and start to live there and eat.
As soon as they are inside you need carefully but quickly tie the plastic bag and throw it away into the trash bin outside the apartment.

How to catch fruit flies with beer bottle:

After drinking a bottle of beer leave 50 Gramm of beer in the bottle for night.
Do not cover the bottle with bottle cap.
In the morning dead fruit flies will be swimming inside.

How to catch fruit flies with apple cider vinegar:

Prepare one jar or cup (doesn’t matter).
Put inside half of the cup of water.
Add two-three spoons of apple cider vinegar.
Add few drops of dishwashing liquid.
Method works as follows: fruit flies are attracted by smell of apple cider vinegar; soap breaks the surface tension of the water; as soon as fruit flies touch water they cannot fly any more.
It is simple. This method is effective for a long period and does not smell.

Important: These options are all working. No need to do all of them. Choose one which is best for you. Just do not panic and do not throw away your fruits in case you noticed some fruit flies in your kitchen. Remember they are only into spoiled fruits. So in fact fruit flies are showing us that some of our fruits started rotten. Anyway fruit flies are not dangerous.

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Method number 2: Prevent appearing of fruit flies

Main rules how to have fruits and vegetables at home and do not get fruit flies:

Always keep fruits and vegetables in the fridge. Especially during the summer when it is hot fruits are very easy to start rotting. As you know it will attract fruit flies.
Always wash fruits as soon as you buy them. This method will maybe shorten duration of time while fruits will stay fresh but it is needed to be sure that you washed away eggs of fruit flies which may be on the sides of the fruits after they were stored in the warehouse of the shop.
Throw trash bin with leftovers of fruits and vegetables the same day you ate fruits or pilled vegetables. Do not give a chance to fruit flies to appear.

Main rules you need to follow to prevent attraction of fruit flies:

You need to wash trash bin and clean regularly kitchen.
Clean up from the table all leftovers of food.
In case you have pets you should clean their bowls regularly. In case they leave some food you should put it into the fridge.
Do not leave dirty dishes.
Regularly check bags or bowls were you keep vegetables and immediately throw away rotten.

We need to find where fruit flies came from and destroy that place:

We have to find their ‘home’ which is usually moist potatoes and/or rotten vegetables.
As soon as you will destroy their source of food and they will have nothing to eat and no place to breed they will gradually disappear. No need to use any special chemical treatments to kill them.
Use jars for everything or keep everything in special boxes or in fridge.
Do not water plants (if you have any).
Check under the sink. Leftovers or small pieces of food may stay and cause appearance of fruit flies.
They can appear in pumpkin which is staying on the shelf or they can appear in the bag with onions. Check all places where you store vegetables and fruits.
Very often they can appear in the pots of your plants. Check every pot.
Always be careful with teapot. Use it and then wash. Do not leave tea for few days. Fruit flies like tea / wet tea leaves as well.

Important: Make sure that everything is clean. Sometimes we are lazy to clean the dishes or we can forget some food on the table. You should always clean up everything. It will take few seconds but it will help you to prevent appearing of this annoying insects. They say it is better to clean up the kitchen ten minutes every day than two hours once in two weeks. Try and maybe results will motivate you to change your routine.

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Method number 3: Use home remedies

How to get rid of fruit flies:

Fruit flies which appeared in flowerpots you can kill using match. Take four or five matches and put its head into the ground of the plant pot. Fruit fly will disappear. In case it didn’t help you should visit flower shop and buy some medicine-chemical for ground.
Fruit flies which appeared in flowerpots are probably eating roots of flowers and enjoying their stay in wet and raw place. In order to protect your plants you can use decorative stones for plants and cover ground with them. Also you can water your flowers twice less for some period of time while you are trying to get rid of insects.
Very often example is when they appear because of the rotten potato, spoiled onions or other rotten vegetables. The main important is to throw away source of the fruit flies. Wait a bit. As soon as source is away they will one by one disappear. Be patient.
Some people do recommend special machines which produce ultrasonic signals. This is quite expensive, but you will be able to easily solve the problem.
Use vacuum cleaner is also an option. Fruit flies can be caught with it while they are flying around and you can try to catch them at the spots were they decided to locate (bags with vegetables or bowls with fruits).
In case you have a jar with flies and you have no time to go outside to throw them away while they are still alive inside you can use freezer. Put jar into the freezer for short and they will die all.
Usually people in shops are trying to sell special gluing tape to catch fruit flies and to get rid of them. Unfortunately such gluing tape will not work on its own. Cover it with wine and you will collect all of them on it.
One more easy and quick solution is beer. Use plate or any bowl which is wide. Cover one centimeter of the bowl bottom with beer. Leave it for night. All of them will come inside and almost all of them will die.
Wash every shelf in the kitchen. Use special strong cleaning substances to clean up the shelves and surfaces.
Clean up under the fridge. Sometimes pieces of food can fall under the fridge and we are not even aware of it.

Important: The amount of solutions is quite big. At the moment when you got fruit flies you want to get rid of them immediately. That is why options are so different. You can just read through and understand that you have something at your place now and you can actually do something now. No need to buy special chemicals or dangerous substances. Especially in case you have pets or kids at home it can be dangerous. You can find some remedies in the supermarket and buy them. But you will soon see that they do not bring that much of result. Spray against fruit flies is not effective and all the rest are questionable.

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Method number 4: What to do if you don’t have any fruits or vegetables

Search for possible places of their habitat and destroy their “houses”:

Search for open packages with nuts.
Look everywhere maybe you have open bag with any type of grains.
Check the sink. Very often inside the sink can stay leftovers of food. They can gather step by step and attract fruit flies. Buy some heavy chemicals and put inside the tube in the sink. This will kill all possible infections and fruit flies.
Check garbage bin. Sometimes plastic bags which we put inside might have tiny gaps. Through the gaps juices or pieces of food can fall into the bin which you use in the kitchen. You can maybe change the plastic bag often but when last time you washed bin? You should do this regularly.
After washing trash bin you should always dry it before using it again. Wet surfaces especially wet bottom of trash bin is attracting fruit flies.
Check near your building. Some people had fruit flies just because right in front of their windows they had trash bins. Windows were open and fruit flies just came to their apartment.
Check balcony. Some people share balcony. In case your neighbors store vegetables on your balcony you can find source of insects there.
Check cans with food for hamsters or fish in case you have them. Some of the food may contain ingredients which will attract fruit flies. In this case you should just get rid of them and find proper storage package for food of your pets.
Be very careful with shoes. There is a possibility that you can bring eggs of insects on your shoes. You can only use special brushes and clean up your shoes near the entrance to the house.
In case you found them in package of onions you better throw away the whole bag. The thing is that you might think you checked vegetables and there are no more rotting onions. But eggs of fruit flies might stay on some vegetables and can be impossible to notice, they might stay in micro spots where vegetable started to rotten. So, better save your place from insects instead of saving few onions for you.

Important: Not everyone likes fruits. Maybe you can even never have fruits at your place. Even more than that you maybe do not have any vegetables at home but you will still have fruit flies. Fruit flies are officially called Drosophila. They received their name as they are fond of fruits, and appear in rotting fruits. Also some people call them wine flies or vinegar flies.

Use these methods and enjoy your wine with fruits without fruit flies.
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