Fruit flies.

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.herbs
Subject: Re: Fruit fly
From: Liz Jones <lizjones+.pitt.edu>
Date: 11 Oct 1995 14:35:03 GMT

>What can I put in my kitchen to get rid of the fruit fly and his many friends.

Open the windows and scrub down your kitchen, chucking the moldy banana in the fruit bowl as you go? Works for me everytime. Two general preventatives= (1) Don't leave fruit or veggies lying out, and (2) try dosing your kitchen drain with some vinegar or baking soda. If after all of the above you still have'm, put a solid rubber drain cover over the kitchen drain-- if they can't get to the water, they have to go elsewhere.

From: camel.winternet.com (caMel)

>What can I put in my kitchen to get rid of the fruit fly and his many friends.

Fruit flies have a very short life cycle (usually less than a week - a
couple of days?). I've only gotten them in my kitchen when I've found a source where they've been breeding. Check under your counters, behind stoves, your refrigerator, etc, to see if some kind of fruit or vegatable hasn't fallen down behind something. They have, on occasion even bred in the little bit of food that may be left over in a container of tin-cans that were waiting to go out to be recycled. If you remove their food supply (it is generally a moist source as they don't breed in dry foods), they will disappear all on their own within a matter of days or weeks. Check any vegatables that you have in open containers for storage (potatoes, onions, etc,) to make sure they are not breeding in there too. If that is the case, you might want to store the food in a refrigerator (makes them dormant) until the foods are used up and the flies are gone for a month or so. One time they found my onions (1 onion in the bin that "went bad"), so I stored the rest in the fridge to interrupt their life-cycles. They are more than welcome to breed by the compost heap outside, but NOT in my house.

From: callie.writepage.com (Callie)

>What can I put in my kitchen to get rid of the fruit fly and his many friends.

Uh ... less fruit?

1. get rid of ALL the current fruit!
2. thoroughly wash all containers in hot soapy water
3. wait a couple weeks for all the adults to die off (or set off a smoke bomb of the insecticidal type)
4. keep all new fruit covered, and don't mix incoming purchases with older fruit ... the flies come in with a purchase, and can spread to other fruit. "covered" can be with a fine cheesecloth or in a paper bag stapled shut with at least a double fold to keep them out.

From: debs.nyquist.bellcore.com (Deborah Rappaport)

The best way I know of to get rid of the fruit fly is to take a bottle - put some juice in the botton - ½ inch or so - take a piece of paper and make a cone out of it with the end only large enough for the fruit fly to fit through - place the cone in the bottle so the end does not touch the juice. Leave this in the area of the flies. In the morning the jar will be full of the flies.
Repeat this until all the flies are gone.

From: hamilton.umbc.edu (Diana Hamilton)

>The best way I know of to get rid of the fruit fly is to take a bottle

This will work even better if you add a couple of drops of dishwashing detergent to the juice. This decreases the surface tension of the liquid, so the flies that land on it will sink and drown.

Also, cider vinegar, and supposedly wine or beer, will also work in place of juice.