This is awesome. I had a standard fruit fly trap set up in my kitchen: a glass with a piece of banana in it, with a funnel sitting in the top and masking tape sealing it to the glass. I had caught one fly, but at least one other was still buzzing around my kitchen, seemingly immune to the allure of rotting banana.
Then I happened to crave an Old Fashioned. As soon as I shook the bitters into my glass, two fruit flies made a beeline for it!
I replaced my banana bait with Angostura, and sure enough, I’ve got two little flies floating in there, tits-up. I don’t know if it’s because of the alcohol, or just because there wasn’t much dry “ground” for them to alight on, but this trap seems lethal. I might try putting something in as an island for them to see if I can humanely release them into the wild, as I’ve tended to do with banana traps. But in the end, I’d rather have a more attractive, yet deadly trap if I have to choose.
Once you locate and get rid of whatever food the fruit flies are after, they’ll go away almost instantly. It can be tricky to find ground zero, though.
Liquid soap up your hands. A little on the wet side, because it’s going to dry and you’ll need to come back and re-wet it.
Walk around, spot them, snatch them out of the air. They’ll stick to the soapy liquid on your hands. Squish them to be sure. I usually then use my finger to move them to the back of my hand and keep hunting.
Every 4-5 minutes you’ll need a small amount of water to re-wet your hands, at that time you can wash the dead ones off your hands and if necessary, add a little soap.
You can just kinda walk in circles back and forth between the kitchen and bathroom, because even if you kill all of the ones in the bathroom, by the time you come back 2 minutes later, there will be more.
I rarely have fruit flies around here, but I use this technique for catching other little flying thingies, like gnats. I find that simply wetting the hands is enough, no need for soap. Just go SNATCH and catch them and they stick.
I just take the lazy way out and don’t clean up my wine glass with a little bit of wine in the bottom when I go to bed. In the morning, fruit fly Passchendale.
You would not either call an exterminator for fruit flies. I call shenanigans.
I’ve heard the recommendation to use vinegar and tried it, but seriously, a little beer or wine is the most effective thing. Leave a little beer out in the bottom of a beer bottle, and the next morning, presto, no more fruit flies.
Seriously, find the offending fruit and get rid of it. 24 hours later and you’re fly-free. (But over the last few days it took me a long time to find ground zero.)
Not so with house flies. I tried it. They were much more intrigued by my windows.
Every fall we get an infestation of these flies which are almost but not quite as small as fruit flies. There are 3 bushes outside the house which seem to correspond to their points of entry and I’m pretty sure they’re the cause but since this lasts only a couple of weeks and I’m a haphazard gardener at best I always forget until the next fall arrives.
We’re at the tail end of it right now and I am going to create a task in my calendar to rip out and replace these things next spring.
They seem to like the compost bag the same as fruit flies do but other methods don’t work the same. They seem to be attracted to white - my greatest success in eliminating them has been small amounts of water in white containers. An inch in the bathtub just about scarred me for life but slaughtered a good chunk of their population.
We always used etherizers in genetics class. The little melanogasters were raised in flasks, however, so you’d have to catch the flies and put them in Erlenmeyer flasks before you use the etherizer.