‘Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.’
The SO likes to have fruit in the house, so naturally there are fruit flies. I haven’t made a fruit fly trap in years, but I did so last Saturday. Half-fill a small bowl with apple cider vinegar. Add three drops of dish soap. Cover with plastic wrap and poke some holes in it so the flies can get in. The flies are attracted to the vinegar. They get in, and the soap reduces the surface tension so they drown.
Works a treat, I tells ya! The bottom of the bowl was nearly covered by the little buggers. I just freshened it up, since I brought home more fruit.
Fruit flies LOVE yogurt! Try some yogurt with some random fruit scraps thrown in. Works better than vinegar. And use a disposable cup so you can just chuck the whole thing.
My folks had a fruit fly problem and my mother likes things to look nice, so I got her a Soapstone Box with Two Fruit Fly Traps. Once she’d used up the two fly traps it came with, she improvised and made her own similar to the OP’s and they worked great but she appreciated having the box to put it in. As suggested by Green Bean, she uses a small tin of some sort from a staple item, for a disposable solution.
I once worked in a Drosophila lab and the critters would get everywhere. We started out making fly traps using containers of fly food with a paper funnel and it worked ok, but not great. I started adding apple juice, and that worked better, but there were still some flies that wouldn’t bite. What they all ultimately found irresistable was red wine. We’d catch a lot with white wine, and some with vinegar, but in a side by side comparison, the trap with the red wine ALWAYS had the most flies.
With my yogurt traps, I’m not trying to get them to drown. I’m just trying to trap them in there so I can throw the cup out. Theoretically they could get back through the holes that that they crawled in, but in practice, it’s not a problem.
How long does it take for you guys to start trapping flies with the other methods. I start getting some within the hour with the yogurt, and then by the next day, the flies are nearly gone. It’s pretty amazing.
We get A LOT of fruit flies in late summer. We take a deli container and fill it with vinegar (red wine or raspberry, whatever’s around) and a few drops of soap. Then I noticed how many of the fruit flies were still hanging around the pineapples instead of the traps so now we add a slice of pineapple to them (or chunk of the skin since it’s just waste anyways). Put the lid on, poke some holes and watch it collect hundreds of fruit flies.
But, the best thing you can do is get rid of the items that their flying around. Keep your drains clean, get rid of tomatoes and pears that are overripe, make sure you don’t have rotten onion in the back of closet, empty your garbage etc…
I know, I know, but I’ll be at someone’s house and they’ll ask me how to get rid of fruit flies and the first thing I’ll do is look around and say 'I know all this fruit looks really nice on the counter, but throw away the over ripe stuff and keep the rest in the fridge, at least during fruit fly season". Most people want to get rid of the flies, but never think of prevention first.
