Every morning, around 6:30 or 7:00 I get up and go to my kitchen to make coffee or have an English muffin. I am greeted by a group of five or six teeny flies that take off from the sink or the counters on either side. Where the hell are they coming from?
In my apartment I have well-sealed screens on the kitchen window as well as on the sliding door leading to my small balcony in the adjacent living room. In addition, both window and slider have been closed for the last few months because of cooler temperatures (yes, we do have cool nights in Southern California.) The slider is occasionally opened during the day in order for me to improve my cell phone reception, but other than that they are both normally closed. The only other window in the bedroom is always closed because it faces an atrium and walkway. I keep that closed to cut down on the noise of conversations and footsteps on the walkways of the three stories.
They seem to like when I don’t do the dishes, which is to say they are feeding on leftover food bits, however small. Now that leads to the circumstances of how, I believe, they got a foothold in my Festung Monkeykeit. For most of April I was on medical leave from work and the dishes and kitchen were not being cleaned on a daily basis. I’m not talking about stacks of dirty dishes in the sinks, but maybe a few pots or plates going unwashed for two or three days. I know, ecch, but the reasons for this aren’t important. I’m just describing what I think gave them the motive for coming in in the first place.
Now for the last three weeks, since coming off of medical leave, the kitchen and dishes have been cleaned immediately after use; there is no exposed food anywhere; there are no flies coming up out of the garbage pail when I open the fairly well sealed lid: what the heck are they living on? How do I get rid of them? Has anyone else had a problem like this?
Fruit Flies. One trap I like uses an empty plastic bottle (soda type). Punch a nice sized hole in the cap. Cut the top 1/3rd off and invert it, so the top is now down in the bottle. Once you see it fits OK, put some apple cider vinegar in the bottle. Then put the top on, tape around the seam, so the flies can’t get out that way. The flies go in the hole you punched in the cap, but when they try to leave, they keep trying to go up, up, up and never find the hole again.
OK. I’ll be doing some science trials now. Drain flies could be it because a week ago in the morning I caught 5 of them lined up on the gasket of my garbage disposal. They immediately flew away with “What? I wasn’t doin’ anything.” looks on their tiny insectoid faces. I got my scrub brush and cleaned the heck out the gasket surface with lots of detergent and they don’t hang out there anymore.
The traps mentioned above really work. You can catch more flies with vinegar than you can with honey. True story, we tested it and everything. Also, a vacuum cleaner works really well.
You need to keep your kitchen meticulously clean. A wet sponge left on the counter is enough for these little bastards, throw out any fruit that’s going bad or keep in in the fridge.
Yeah, I have been. Scrubbing grout, checking out cabinetry, mopping the floor with Pine-Sol, scrubbing my Scotch-Brite sponge, et c. Any food that might be vaguely moist (bread, fruit, leftovers in Tupperware) is kept in the fridge or thrown out with a long rinse through the garbage disposal. That’s why I’m optimistic about the Foaming Pipe Snake as a first measure. The symptoms described in the thread referenced by KneadToKnow matched mine pretty well.
I think what pisses me off most is that they are so frigging difficult to swat with two hands. Every hour, or so, one flies between me and my monitor in my office (adjacent to the kitchen) and I can’t for the life of me get more than a 5% kill ratio per attempt. Being a student of aerodynamics I think that their Reynolds numbers are so low that my converging hands are actually squeezing them out of the way of their intended death.