Contrary to the title of this post, fruit flies drive me crazy. The title is in reference to the song Evie sings when a fruit fly is buzzing around her: “Fruit fly don’t bother me, fruit fly don’t bother me, fruit fly don’t bother me, ’cause I belong to somebody!”
We have two problems, 1) we have an amazing amount of fresh produce lying around at all times. Between Sara’s two-a-day banana smoothie habit and the tomatoes etc. from the garden, amongst all of our other fruit consumption, about every square inch of available space is covered in fruit. 2) We save compost for the garden. I’m not sure this is really a problem anymore, since we now store it in seal-able containers, but I think it used to be more of a problem when we were using empty milk cartons.
For whatever the reason, we have fruit flies from time to time and I HATE them! It’s kind of funny though, you never really see a big cloud of fruit flies. Usually you see only one fruit fly. Finally you kill it and you think, “Ha, I got that fruit fly! Now I won’t have a fruit fly bothering me anymore!” Not so. Somewhere in the house, fruit fly dispatch sees that I’ve killed one and sends a replacement out to bother me immediately. There is a never ending supply of them!
BUT! We have now won the war! I’m here to tell you, I have the cure for fruit flies!
Take a regular cereal bowl and fill it with equal parts apple cider vinegar and water. Then put a few drops of dish soap in. The fruit flies are attracted to the vinegar and they try to land on the water to get it. Normally a fruit fly can walk on the surface of the water due to the surface tension. This is where the dish soap comes in. The dish soap breaks the surface tension on the water and the fruit fly sinks to the bottom.
If you have fruit flies, try this out! It is an amazingly effective fruit fly trap and doesn’t cost anything. Sara and I were cackling gleefully every time we trapped one of the little bastards. Here’s to a fruit fly free home!
Shane Halbach 
Here I thought Evie was singing “shoo fly, don’t bother me”. Great idea for the fruit fly trap. I’m thinking it must be the compost that attracts them because we always have bananas and lately have had lots of tomatoes but no fruit flies. I used to have them though when I was saving compost.
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Well obviously that’s where the fruit fly song comes from. We started out by singing shoo fly, so she still sings that sometimes, and she sings that for other bugs besides fruit flies.
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You want to talk about bothersome flies my friend. Working at a cigarette store gives me a unique experience with them. I have dubbbed them nicotine flies. They also do the one per encounter dispatch method that you mentioned, however, they also are uniquely aggressive about peoples faces. I think this is because after about 3 hours of flying around lowbobs these flies basically become two pack a day smokers. So if you stop smoking they get real aggresive and start divebombing your head and mouth looking for more of that sweet smoke.
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I think you could discreetly hide a bowl of apple cider vinegar and soap around the store somewhere, although that might not be as appealing to nicotine addict flies!
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I thought they were pretty much behind us, but a new crop of hungry babies have appeared and are diving all over the kitchen.
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