My kitchen and bathroom have been plagued with fruit flies for a few weeks now. About a month ago, my wife bought a bunch of bananas from Target that came in a plastic bag. A few days after she bought them, and before they were actually ripe, she went to get a banana out when she realized the bag was swarming with flies. We threw them out and haven’t had any fresh fruit in the house since, but they keep coming back.
I’ve scrubbed the kitchen counters, emptied the trash and recycling, poured boiling water down the drains, run the dishwasher every night, and still they come back. I left one yogurt cup on the counter this morning for an hour, and there were dozens of them swarming around - although, oddly, not in the yogurt itself. They seem to be attracted to white surfaces - they were on the Windex handle, a plastic cup and the paper towel roll. Anyway, how do I get rid of them?
My girlfriend is a PhD geneticist who worked with fruit flies on a daily basis, and this is her method:
Get a narrow-necked and not especially long (deep) bottle. (She uses an Ehrlenmeyer flask, but it’s understandable if you don’t have one.) Fill it part of the way with water. Put some yeast in the water. Fruit files go cookoo for yeast.
Put a funnel in the neck of the bottle. Put some soap around the edge of the inside of the funnel.
Flies will fly into the bottle looking for lunch, but have a hell of a time getting back out again, and even if they do, the soap will make it damn near impossible to crawl out again. This method can wipe 'em out by the dozens.
I’ve been fighting this this week too. You’ve already done the initial steps, and although the cleaning doesn’t seem to be working, it was necessary to prevent reinfestation.
The RAID flying insect spray is a complete waste of money. The vinegar/fruit traps held very little interest for them. The hanging sticky thing like my grandmother used caught five the first day, a few more each consecutive day. Spraying hairspray on them didn’t work at all.
Windex works a treat. Any time you see a group of them just spray them down with it. They’ll fall and you can just wipe them up with a wet paper towel. Also has about a 80% effectiveness when sprayed on a swarm in the air.
But I got the majority of them this way: Put a banana (no peel) in a casserole dish in your oven before you go to bed tonight. Leave the door open and the light on in there.
In the morning, slam the door shut and turn it up to 400. Be ready with the Windex for any that avoid the closing door.
hth
P.S. I keep hearing the family from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” yelling ‘Windex!!!’ every time I see one. LOL!
Also note that boiling water down the drain may not be enough to kill those off. A couple of drops of bleach in each drain for a few minutes, rinsed out with hot water after that, seems to work much better. At least on our sporadic infestations.
Put a cup or 2 of fruitjuice in the bowl along with a drop or two of detergent (this helps cut the surface tension - making them more likely to drown).
Place plastic wrap over the bowl.
Poke ~10 holes in the plastic wrap - roughly the size of a pencil in diameter.
Place in an area of infestation and wait.
Over time, the little buggers will be attracted by the smell of the fruitjuice. They will eventually find their way into your trap, but won’t be able to get out. Eventually, they will drown and sink to the bottom. After a few days - pour out your little stew of soapy juice and fly bodies. Repeat as necessary.
My fruit fly trap is the same basic trap as others with only slight differences:
Put an ounce or two of semi sweet red wine* in a juice glass. Put saran wrap over the top of the juice glass and poke 2 small holes in it (the diameter of a fruit fly body - it’s pretty small). Put on the counter near the fruit bowl. The flies go in, but they can’t get out. When the juice is crowded with fly bodies, replace the wine.
It’s an ongoing thing at my house. I am never completely without fruit flies, I guess because I am never completely without fruit. Good luck.
*I experimented with all kinds of bait, including fruit juice, vinegar, jelly and sugar water, but they seem to like the semi sweet red wine the best here.
I poured a little vinegar in an almost-empty bottle of White Zin and left it on the counter by the sink before I left for work. They were swarming around it, but not actually going in the bottle. Maybe I’ll try again overnight with some apple juice. I think I have a box of some Target-brand Shiraz-Merlot mix that’s a few months old that I could refill it with, too. (Can you tell we’re not big wine drinkers?)
Are you sure they are fruit flies and not drain flies? Drain flies are very difficult to get rid of. The only thing I found worked was a foam version of Liquid Plummer, which eats through any organic matter in the drain. Ammonia, bleach, non-foaming drain cleaners and such do nothing, even boiling water won’t kill them.
During my last fruit fly swarm, I jerry-rigged two traps, both using beer bottles, that got rid of the flies in just a couple of days.
One had a small amount of white wine (pinot grigio, IIRC), and the other had a small amount of beer. For both of them, I took a sandwich bag, sliced off the teeniest bit of one corner to make a fruit-fly-sized hole, and then tightly rubberbanded the bag over the top of the bottle, poking the corner with the hole down an inch or two into the neck to create a funnel channeling the flies into the bottle.
I used a version of this. I rubbed olive oil on the bowl and placed a piece of fresh strawberry or banana, then covered it like above. They loved it. Then I flooded the bowl with water once they were all in there… they didn’t love that so much.
