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Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors
- Jaygles 3y agoI am convinced fruit flies are some sort of multidimensional being. I will sit in a room, observe three fruit flies in the air, swat and kill those three fruit flies, then sit back and observe no change in the number of flies in the air. They either throw out decoys when you swat them to fool us, or there’s a large queue of them waiting to take their turn to keep the number flying constant
- zacharycohn 3y agoSounds like you need a multi-phasic trans-dimensional pitcher plant.
- nyjah 3y agoI’ll add some tinder to the fire. I have an indoor bug zapper. I set it next to a window and it gets the bugs that are inside. Does a great job. But always intermittently some small fly will fly into it. Even when a door hasn’t been opened. I joke, but I’m semi convinced that 1 in every few billion try’s, the tiny flys make it thru the glass of the window. Where else are they coming from ? lol.
- yreg 3y agoOf course The Simulation has wallhacks.
- squirtlebonflow 3y agoIf a mouse can get in your house, so can a fly. There are holes
- hgsgm 3y ago[flagged]
- Terr_ 3y ago... Looks fine to me? (33 mins later)
- joecool1029 3y agoI think you need showdead on in your profile settings, go to their comment history and see all the dead comments they have? That's a sign of shadowban.
- theamk 3y agoJust check the thread in incognito window.. I see it, so no shadowban is involved. (unless you have some very unusual definition of "shadowban"?)
- yreg 3y agoWhen you open squirtle's profile, there are many dead comments in a row. It's possible they are shadowbanned and the comments that are not dead (such as the one in this thread) have been aproved manually. But in that case dang already knows.
- joecool1029 3y agoUsers can vouch dead comments from the shadowbanned if they have showdead on and sometimes they'll appear for everyone like this one did. Doesn't change the fact any new comments the shadowbanned user posts will automatically go dead. I vouch a few dead comments per week usually, and around half come back.
- cyclotron3k 3y agoThey are basically quarks. If the gap between any two quarks gets too big, a third quark will pop into existence between them*. *I may have grossly misunderstood my physics lecturer. It was a long time ago.
- xnzakg 3y agoSounds like the Game of Life
- Filligree 3y agoThe binding energy between quarks is so huge (more than 99% of the total energy of a proton) that, if you attempt to pull them apart, the energy you have to apply in the process is enough to create additional quarks. So it’s not that they just pop into existence. You, as the person pulling them apart, are the cause of the extra quarks being created.
- Timon3 3y agoVery similar to how you, as the person swatting the flies, generate enough energy for another to spontaneously emerge.
- wholinator2 3y agoHmmm but the fly must have some kind of incredible complexity compared to a pair of subatomic particles. I mean, it's made of an uncountable number of such particles, bound together in an extremely complex singular arrangement. And as i recall, the energy to separate 2 quarks (produce a quark anti-quark pair) is somewhere around the hundreds of MeV. I wonder how hard you'd have to slap a table to spontaneously generate a fruit fly. Or the average number of attempts required.
- frutiger 3y agoActually a pair of quarks are created, not only a third one. This is required to keep the overall set colorless.
- austinl 3y agoI can't blame medieval scholars for believing that flies spontaneously generated from things like raw meat (instead of reproducing). I would guess that fruit flies played a major role in supporting this theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
- stavros 3y agoBut how are they born? I'll have no fruit flies in the house, and then I'll forget a potato, it rots, and then I'll be infested with fruit flies. Were they already on the potato before it rotted, or did one just happen in, found some food, and figured it would stay and start a family here?
- mattpallissard 3y agoThey ride in on your grocery store produce. They also seem to hang out in/near soil in house plants.
- jb1991 3y agoI think they’re actually on fruit or may be vegetables in your case from the start.
- stavros 3y agoYeah, that's my suspicion as well, as I rarely just see one lone random fruit fly in the flat.
- sandworm101 3y agoClean/peal the potato and immediately put it in a sealed container. No flies will appear. Only flies beget flies.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoThis is what I always wondered about maggots, like when a person in any kind of sealed room, anywhere, dies and starts to decompose. I've been lead to believe maggots inevitably appear and start the process but where did the larvae come from?! Food?
- prennert 3y agoThe reproductive cycle of fruit flies is approx 10 days. A single fertilized female will lay 100s of eggs over her life. But not all at once, it's more like 5 a day. So if you have a single fertilized female in a room, about 10 days later, you will start getting those handful flies emerge every day. You can keep your room completely isolated, but still you can catch 5 a day on average for about a month or two (in lab conditions longer). If you don't catch them all and you end up with another fertilized female, the story continues. I think flies are very opportunistic individuals, in the sense that there is always a fly hatching somewhere. If there is food, it will lay the eggs there. If there is no food it will try and stick around or die. But even if it dies, it's bothers and sisters are constantly emerging. So the population will survive a lot of adverse conditions.
- barefootcoder 3y agoI think I had one lay eggs in my house. A few weeks ago, on a day when I hardly opened a door for more than a few seconds I suddenly found at least 100 horseflies in my house. I was sucking them up with a hand vac and releasing them outside, and every few hours I’d go suck up about 30 more — and every single day after that I found at least 30 or so more for at least a week. I’m still seeing 1-2 per day, but at least that’s manageable. Hopefully these last stragglers are the last that I’ll have. It’s nuts!
- b112 3y agoreleasing horse flies. Horse flies are the bitey kind, so release?! ... well, no polite words here. (House flies are typically just... flies) Also, you probably have a dead mouse or some such, in a crawl space. Thus maggots, thus flies.
- barefootcoder 3y agoOops. Autocorrupt got me. Houseflies.
- b112 3y agoProof that AI is sentient, and malign. The more horseflies, the more societal unrest.
- AlbertCory 3y agoDepends on your home's location, I guess. I don't have fruit flies. Where I am, pantry moths are the problem. One of the few genuinely useful ideas I've ever gotten off NextDoor is this: Dr. Killigan's Premium Pantry Moth Traps with Pheromones. The pheromones attract the moths, and the glue makes them stick to it and die. You can put it out of site in a cabinet, and after a few weeks it's covered with dead moths.
- arijun 3y agoYou can also mitigate pantry moths by rotating all their potential food sources (like flour) through the freezer for a few days to kill any eggs and larvae that might be there. If I see a moth I will try to hunt down which food it came from (you can sort of identify by seeing webbing which suspends bits of whatever they’re eating), and toss it. And then everything else goes in the freezer to stop it from propagating. The other option is to put things individually into well-sealed tubs or jars, to isolate any moths that might be there (they will drill a hole through thin plastic, like ziplock) Honestly the trap method makes me a bit squeamish; if you’re continuously catching new moths, that means there're still eggs and larvae in at least one of your bags of food. The idea of eating that is a bit disturbing is to me.
- iJohnDoe 3y agoThe traps are there to help as well. Highly recommend. You still have to find the source as you describe. However, if one of the moths flys out and away from the cupboard, they still might lay eggs some where else. You want the new hatchlings to go straight to the trap and get stuck.
- Jill_the_Pill 3y agoThey do nest in the cracks between the shelf and the wall, under shelf paper, and even between the pages of cookbooks. We have had some moderate success with the traps, plus storing big bags of rice and flour in picnic coolers and everything else in airtight containers, but they have to be really airtight -- those little buggers can get under the lid of a mason jar or the tops of a canister set. What happens now is like a lesson in public health and contagion: one container will occasionally get a mess of webs and moths, but the scope is limited.
- ortusdux 3y agoI have some very happy pitcher plants in the window over my sink for just this reason. I've been meaning to pick up some Triantha occidentalis as well, a newly discovered carnivorous plant. Well the plant is not newly discovered, but it took doping fruit flies with N-15 and monitoring nutrient uptake to prove that it is metabolizing insects. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2022724118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2022724118
- optimalsolver 3y agoJust buy some spiders and let them loose.
- zacharycohn 3y agoThen you'll need a bunch of hummingbirds to eat all the spiders. Then cats to eat the hummingbirds. Then wolves to eat the cats.
- rufus_foreman 3y agoPrincipal Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend. Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards? Principal Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards. Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse? Principal Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Lisa: Then we're stuck with gorillas! Principal Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death. Lisa: Hmm.
- grepfru_it 3y agoThis sounds like the start of a great children's book
- rufus_foreman 3y agoThere was an old lady who swallowed a cow...
- 1letterunixname 3y agoPretty soon, you're living in rural Canada.
- mark-r 3y agoThat would be a beautiful story, except that hummingbirds don't eat spiders - they eat flower nectar.
- digdugdirk 3y agoWho is Audrey and how did she hurt this person?
- 542458 3y agoAudrey II is the carnivorous plant from the musical the article’s title references. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0091419/characters/nm0835925 https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0091419/characters/nm0835925
- digdugdirk 3y agoCan't believe I missed the reference. Thank you.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lbeckman314 3y ago"Audrey II is an invasive species to earth, originating 'past the stars, and beyond the moon,' or about 490 light-years from Earth on Kepler-186f. If you had a Falcon Heavy Rocket, a cryostasis chamber, and were willing to leave behind everything you’ve ever known on Earth, you could check out Audrey II in its natural habitat where it is the dominant species. Otherwise, Audrey II can be purchased from local New York florists for a paltry $1.95, post-eclipse." [0] [0]: https://carnivorousplantresource.com/the-plants/audrey-ii/ https://carnivorousplantresource.com/the-plants/audrey-ii/
- acheron 3y agoA mean green mother from outer space.
- DonHopkins 3y agoYou should stop carrying the water for child abusers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882634
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoTime flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. When I was a child, I liked lizards, rats, and frogs as pets, and I also enjoyed the occasional Venus Flytrap from the nursery. I considered some pitcher plants recently, but I had to weigh their effectiveness against cockroaches, and the need to build a whole tropical environment with lights, heat and humidity. Lastly, that brand of essential oil is the same one I purchase, and it's great. I use them in a diffuser.
- zacharycohn 3y agoPitcher plants don't need a tropical environment! There are many that are even from Canada. Ours is doing great in an indoor Seattle environment just sitting on a windowsill that only gets an hour or two of direct sun per day.
- zukzuk 3y agoThat is very much not the environment sarracenia purpurea evolved in. I can't imagine it will survive very long. They need a lot of direct light, and they definitely need a winter dormancy period. They do not make great houseplants, at least not for more than a few weeks or months. Tropical pitcher plants (Nepenthes) do make decent houseplants, although they struggle through the dry indoor Canadian winters here. They do seem to capture a lot of the fungus gnats I've been fighting with lately (I can see dozens and dozens in each pitcher), but not nearly enough to make a noticeable difference.
- zacharycohn 3y agoAccording to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarracenia_purpurea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarracenia_purpurea), sarracenia purpurea are from Canada and the north-half of the east coast of the United States.
- joecool1029 3y agoI've spotted them now numerous times around New Jersey and the first time I ever noticed one was on vacation in Newfoundland, I spotted it in bogland leading up to a landlocked fjord near gros morne (western newfoundland). I just never remembered seeing a flower like that facing the ground, so found it interesting and shot a picture and ID'd it later on. So yeah, they absolutely grow wild but aren't an extremely prolific plant, best places to see them are usually near bogs and ponds.
- UberFly 3y agoHe mentions apple cider vinegar and dish soap. It's worked well for me too but there are always a few flies that aren't as interested in the concoction so yea only a 90% solution. I've also found that many of these flies come in from the grocery store in things like strawberries so we're careful to check before they enter. Good article - would love to try these plants.
- zacharycohn 3y agoTry adding wine! I started with apple cider vinegar and yeah, it worked but a lot of them ignored it. Adding the wine really upped the efficiency of those traps.
- OJFord 3y agoIn abstract, sounds like raising the sweetness is what helped? Which tracks, I've never really been aware of vinegar being a particular attraction. (And I love the stuff, if anyone would notice...)
- UberFly 3y agoHas to be apple cider vinegar. It must smell of old apples or something.
- OJFord 3y agoMy guess is that apple juice would fare better than cider vinegar. The vinegar to me sounds like someone's idea of making it seem more chemical, more like a cleaning product - but this is just a mechanical trap, you could use anything, just a piece of whatever they seem attracted to even (e.g. extract from compost caddy).
- mst 3y agoA glass I was drinking hard cider from left out with a splash still in the bottom seems to reliably acquire corpses overnight.
- adriand 3y agoThe best method is to put a bit of fruit peel and some beer or wine or vinegar at the bottom of a glass (e.g. a pint glass) and then fashion a cone out of paper, where the wide end of the cone is the same size as the mouth of the glass. Cut the pointy end so it’s a few millimeters wide. Insert pointy end first, and tape the wide end of the cone to the brim of the glass, forming a seal. Flies will enter the glass via the opening in the point of the cone, and will be unable to leave. This will collect huge numbers of them with zero maintenance.
- unixfg 3y agoBuying a plant seems easier, and I'm definitely not crafty enough to build a fruit-peel beer cone glass and have it look good enough to display.
- hgsgm 3y agoThe flies are a worse display problem than the glass
- aradox66 3y agoThis is awesome and you feel powerful vengeance until you accidentally slip the paper cone a bit on disposal and a hundred fruit flies escape at once.
- tomrod 3y agoVinegar - slosh around a bit and take most or all of them out.
- zacharycohn 3y agoI've tried this several times and it's never been successful. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I'm glad you got it to work!
- Tagbert 3y agoI mix some cider vinegar, some fruit juice or cider, and a drop of dish soap. I put that in a small jar. I get some plastic film and make a small hole in the middle of the plastic about the size of a pea. I place the plastic on the jar and secure with a rubber band. Place that on the kitchen counter near where the flies congregate. They will follow the scent down the hole where they will be mostly trapped and if they touch the liquid, they will sink and drown as the soap removed the surface tension.
- nullwarp 3y agoMy favorite way to tackle this is to use a bowl of bait and one of those cheapo bug zapper rackets. I take the racket and use a rubber band around the button to keep it "on" and then set the racket above a bowl of whatever bait I need to use. I leave it there until the zaps finally stop. Has yet to fail me in clearing out a fly infestation.
- squirtlebonflow 3y agoWhy distilled water? It presumably doesn't rain distilled water outside.
- zacharycohn 3y agoThere are many minerals added to tap water as part of water treatment. Rain water does not have those. So it technically does rain distilled water!
- mark-r 3y agoBut that's exactly what rain is! Water vapor that has condensed and hasn't been in contact with any minerals or contaminants.
- pests 3y agoHow does acid rain work then
- deanc 3y agoI can’t attest to the recurring source of fruit flies of OP but they come primarily from fully grown herbs sold in supermarkets in Finland. I’ve found being vigilant and simply hoovering them up with a handheld Dyson is enough over the course of a few days to get rid of the infestation. Of course, be vigilant with hygiene during this period.
- teruakohatu 3y agoThat is interesting. I know someome who buys those herbs in NZ and also complains about flies. How did you make the connection?
- deanc 3y agoBecause you can literally see them flying off the herbs when you take them home ;-)
- phito 3y agoI've been growing carnivorous plants for more than 15 years and own a business selling them. I can assure you these Sarracenia will not do anything against your fruit flies problem. Pinguicula or Drosera will catch more of them and can actually grow indoors all year round given enough light. But even then, they're not really good at pest control. Sarracenia are outdoors plants, they need a ton of direct sunlight and a seasonal rest in winter. They already look light deprived in your pictures.
- zacharycohn 3y ago/shrug I got 15 dead fruit flies in my Sarracenia. YMMV I guess.
- phito 3y agoWell if that's enough to keep up with the infestation then great! I never noticed fruit flies getting attracted by Sarracenia but I don't grow that genus a lot, so I could be wrong. Still, I would recommend getting a Mexican Pinguicula (for example Pinguicula "Tina"). They do better in lower light and the sticky leaves work much better against fruit flies and gnats :)
- jacquesm 3y ago> Well if that's enough to keep up with the infestation then great! I never noticed fruit flies getting attracted by Sarracenia but I don't grow that genus a lot, so I could be wrong. sits at odds with: > I can assure you these Sarracenia will not do anything against your fruit flies problem. Maybe instead grow a bunch and test and see if you can find out why the author has success where you do not? Otherwise the 'assurance' bit seems a bit thin.
- empyrrhicist 3y agoIt doesn't really, it expresses skepticism as I read it, along with acknowledgement of an outside chance that the original claim was wrong.
- elliottkember 3y agoIf none of the low-tech hacks in here seem to work, or you have the same kind of gadget addiction as me, I can recommend the "Katchy" brand of bug catchers. They work at night with UV light, and have decimated the fruit fly population in my kitchen.
- pers0n 3y agoCinnamon powder works, but use a mask when putting a lot out. I got a sinus infection from putting it in all my houseplants
- zzzeek 3y agoWe use the little vinegar traps but sometimes you just have to go in there with the vacuum cleaner hose set to high power and suck up as many as possible. That will give you a few hours respite to use your kitchen until the next day when theyll be back at full power.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- entropicgravity 3y agoMy low tech but effective technique is: put a very little red wine in a wine glass (preferably stemless); flies will quickly congegrate. When there's enough (your judgement, for me 15 or more) very slowly place a plastic yogurt lid over the glass. Then put the whole thing in the freezer for 30minutes. They'll be dead, rinse and repeat. No muss no fuss.
- almostnormal 3y agoHas anyone tried CO2? The idea: Deep trash can for the tasty banana peels. Flood the trash can with CO2. CO2 is heavier than air. If the trash can is deep enough maybe a sufficiently high concentration can be maintained without too frequent flooding. The attractive smell should still be noticeble for the flies. And the environment around the trash of their desires is deadly.
- Turskarama 3y agoI don't think it's _enough_ heavier than air to stay in there too long, it will diffuse out probably within only a couple of hours.
- dekhn 3y agoI have used CO2 to disable flies (they just go to sleep) so that I can put them in a venus flytrap. Although, in my case, I was doing this in a science lab so I had access to a specialized device (a porous marble stone with CO2 being diffused through it). Once they're disabled, you can put them in the trap, trigger the little hairs, and when the fly wakes up, the trap stays closed due to the fly wiggling around, and a month later they open up and a dessicated fly falls out.
- CatAtHeart 3y agoWe bought a cheap standalone bug zapper and put it on the counter and it has been a life saver for the fruit flies. Ours come from bananas, we think, and washing them after bringing them home from from the store seems to help some too. The best part is, working from our offices in separate rooms, my wife and I will hear a zap and both shout "Good job bug zapper!"
- staplung 3y agoEveryone knows that fruit flies spontaneously generate. My preferred method to get rid of them is with a black hole: I put a couple of pieces of fruit into my homemade Superconducting Apricot Collider, set it on high and then place the resulting black hole right above the compost bin. Works every time. Just be careful with the black hole because if you drop them they fall all the way to the center of the earth and are rather difficult to retrieve.
- dylan604 3y agoYou can control your black hole with rare earth magnets. set them around the area where you are going to create the black hole to form a containment area. you might need to play with the size/quantity/distance of the placement of the magnets for best performance. I have not needed dry ice for cryogenic cooling.
- moomoo11 3y agoI just let them be. It’s fun to watch them.
- latchkey 3y agoFungus gnats are also an issue if you keep indoor plants. I recently discovered that you can water your plants with mosquito dunks in the water, which will put the bacteria (aka: BTI, bacillus thuringiensis strain BMP 144) contained in the dunks into the soil. The bacteria then paralyze the larvae growing in the soil and they die. Doing even more research, it seems there is a newer strain of the bacteria (AM 65-52) that you can buy in 16lbs! buckets for $570 off Amazon (or people have broken it into smaller batches on ebay). This stuff really works like magic. Once the adults die off, no more appear. Gnatrol Biological Larvicide Fungus Larvae
- hahajk 3y agoI remember reading that fungus gnats are a sign you're overwatering your houseplants. (Water uptake is correlated with photosynthesis, indoor plants don't get or usually need much light). I just did a quick internet search and it looks like the popular advice for fungus gnats is still the same - water less. It'll also prevent root rot.
- latchkey 3y agoThat certainly helps, but doesn't really solve the problem. With that logic, every time you water, even infrequently, is a chance for them to come back.
- javajosh 3y agoI have to say that excitedly waiting for Amazon to deliver 16 lbs of bacteria makes me want to laugh/puke/write a screenplay for black mirror.
- sshanky 3y agoThis definitely works for me. One of my favorite solutions. I used to have a bottle of concentrated bacteria but I don’t know where to find that any more. Now I get something called mosquito bits and let them soak in the water I use on the plants.
- pbnjay 3y agoBought some pitcher plants about 2.5 years ago, water with regular tap water and keep some grow lights over them in the kitchen and we haven’t had any real fly problems ever since. They’ve actually overgrown a bit and we need to transplant them soon!
- at_a_remove 3y agoI occasionally get drain flies in the shower, but this time I have a Spider In Residence. I previously had a pretty good working relationship with a shower spider: I would do a series of thumps to indicate I was about to turn on the shower. I would leave a couple of drops of water on the shower insert's top edge. I would fling various bugs into its web. We had a basic understanding. It died, sadly. The new Shower Spider is doing alright, and it occurs to me that there's this complex web of life: my hair in the drain, some kind of fungus is in there growing on it, drain flies eating the fungus and flying up, they are caught by the spider, which then makes a web to catch more flies. So the matter that was once my hair enters the cycle of life and ends up above me in a spider web.
- alanbernstein 3y agoSo beautiful
- the_af 3y agoI know the author, quite correctly, rules Venus flytraps out, but for the sake of argument: I used to keep some just for the sake of it, not at all to hunt bugs because that won't scale. In humid Buenos Aires, I tried both indoors and outdoors and... they are pretty hard to keep, aren't they? You must water them lightly with distilled water. You must NOT let them flower (it's hard to overstate this, but it's true and I verified it first hand: the plant sprouts a single flower once a year, and if you don't prevent this by cutting the stalk ASAP, a single ugly white flower will sprout, and then your flytrap will die of exertion). You must not overfeed it. If it catches a bug on its own, chances are the "trap" will turn black and rot. They seem to be very hard to keep outside their natural swamp environment...
- dylan604 3y agoI've only seen carnivorous plants do well in terrariums. Trying to keep them as a house plant doesn't work since most houses are not humid jungle climates inside. even orchids do not do well in most people's homes. The best orchids I've seen were kept in a bathroom with a window steamy showers are taken daily.
- a_bonobo 3y ago>They seem to be very hard to keep outside their natural swamp environment... As the NatureServe status says: >The Venus Flytrap, a carnivorous species, is a narrow endemic of the coastal plain of North and South Carolina in the southeastern United States. It has very strict habitat requirements which include frequent natural fire, an open understory and low nutrient soils. There are close to 100 extant natural occurrences and between 73,000 - 158,000 total individuals. The species continues to decline, however, and should be reviewed frequently. Threats include poaching from wild populations, habitat conversion, and fire suppression. There are very few natural areas left where these plants can survive, and these areas are tiny! >Current range: The range of Venus flytrap is quite localized in scattered savannas of the coastal plain of southeastern North Carolina and adjacent eastern South Carolina in an approximate landward radius of 100 miles around Wilmington, North Carolina (North Carolina Natural Heritage Program 2010). Currently 68 extant occurrences are known from the following counties in North Carolina (the number of occurrences in parentheses): Bladen (5), Brunswick (21), Carteret (1), Columbus (3), Craven (1), Cumberland (4), Hoke (7), New Hanover (5), Onslow (12), Pender (7), and Sampson (2) (North Carolina Natural Heritage Program 2010), and Horry County (4), South Carolina (South Carolina Heritage Trust 1993b). In a way, these plants have evolved into a dead end. They mostly lost their chloroplast genomes so they can't 'go back' to being regular plants. Perhaps your mistake was that you don't set your kitchen on fire often enough? https://explorer.natureserve.org/Taxon/ELEMENT_GLOBAL.2.159781/Dionaea_muscipula https://explorer.natureserve.org/Taxon/ELEMENT_GLOBAL.2.1597...
- mixmastamyk 3y agoSounds like a lot of work. Once we had a fruit fly problem and I read several guides on how to deal with them. Each evening after cleaning up and taking out the trash, I’d whip out the vacuum arm without attachment and send the swarm to their doom. Believe I had to do it three times over a week or so, then it was done.
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoa splash of apple cider vinegar I love that the adage "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar" is literally false.
- teddyh 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/357/ https://xkcd.com/357/
- gerbilly 3y agoAll these solutions are mean, fruit flies don't do any harm. In the winter I kind of like them cos I don't have a chance to see insects. Also let me wax a bit poetic and say how much of a miracle a little thing like a fruit fly is. How long will it be before a 'startup' can make a flying robot of the same size and intelligence? (my bet is on....never)
- artificialLimbs 3y agoThey fly up my nose at night. We have taken great joy in splitting them in half or flattening them with nerf guns. Pro tip: long barreled guns are the tits.
- ergvgdvgrd 3y ago[dead]
- EB66 3y agoFor anyone contending with the menace of fruit flies or gnats (and especially if you own a fair number of indoor plants), I could not recommend these more wholeheartedly: https://www.amazon.com/Stingmon-Pack-Sticky-Fruit-Fungus/dp/B07XLM4FWL/ref=mp_s_a_1_7_sspa https://www.amazon.com/Stingmon-Pack-Sticky-Fruit-Fungus/dp/... It's essentially a better looking version of fly paper. They're easy to place alongside indoor plants. Fruit flies and gnats are attracted to decaying organic matter and the moist soil of indoor plants is an often overlooked oasis for them. Gnats are more likely to hang out in indoor potted soils (especially if overwatered) because they feed on fungus, but fruit flies can take refuge there too. A couple years back I had a months long battle with fruit flies. Kitchen was always clean, garage sealed up tight, no indoor compost, I used apple vinegar traps of all styles but nothing solved the problem until I placed those sticky paper inserts at the base of all my indoor plants. Within a week the fruit flies were gone.
- sulam 3y agoSecond this, they are amazing at catching all kinds of little bugs that tend to live on your plants.
- jaktet 3y agoNo idea if it’s better or worse but fwiw I used this last time after the vinegar and traps I sent didn’t work: https://a.co/d/3O4CSsA https://a.co/d/3O4CSsA We had an insane fruit fly problem after coming home from vacation and this cleared them up pretty quick I think I’d rather use your solution instead of running this device though
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- atourgates 3y agoWe had a weeks long battle with fruit flies last summer. Tried every tip, trick, remedy and commercial solution we could find. We were up to our eyeballs in apple cider vinegar, fly paper, sprays, traps and the like. Nothing worked. Then we discovered one of our kids had hung up their unfinished lunch from the last day of school in their lunch bag, and left it to rot in the laundry room. Fixed our fruit fly problem pretty quickly after that.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> They congregate around the compost bin and the fruit bowl (where there are always lots of bananas). That’s just what happens when you leave fruit and food scraps out.
- tivi 3y agoYou don't have to kill them. This reusable live trap works very good: https://www.hagglezon.com/en/s/frubby https://www.hagglezon.com/en/s/frubby
- mcv 3y agoI'm afraid I take a much cruder approach. We have a fruit fly infestation every summer, and besides keeping fruit and other food out of their reach, I simply hunt them down. Nearly every summer our walls are a graveyard of hundreds of drosophila corpses. (Though I haven't seen many of them yet this summer.) Unfortunately they leave ugly spots on our walls and ceilings, and most walls are not that easy to clean, so I developed a couple of techniques where I don't squash them on the wall: I slap my hands together just above where they're sitting, they see my hands move and fly up, just between my hands. Timing takes some practice, but I've had thousands of opportunities to perfect this technique. Our kitchen wall has been treated to make it easy to clean, so there I just squash them against the wall, which is much easier.
- wirrbel 3y agoA cup with a vinegar, soap mix does the trick for the small flys
- fit2rule 3y ago[dead]
- ornornor 3y agoThis is how we won our war on fruit flies: - repot all plants after rinsing all soil from them - use leca balls instead of soil and water the plants with a water + fertilizer solution (this is what they do for office plants and why they have stickers saying “do not water”) - all incoming fruits and vegetables soak in water + vinegar for 20–30 min as this kills any eggs (they’ll also last longer because they don’t spoil as fast) - have bug screens on any window that we keep open (they don’t come standard in Europe) - the fruit basket is also enclosed in a bug screen for good measure I believe fruit flies mostly came through grocery store fruits (eggs on the fruits) and then hatched and went to live in the houseplants soil where they’d eat the roots.
- dvh 3y agoFruit flies are easy to manage but these monsters: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sciaridae https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sciaridae
- rafsrt 3y agoDoes anyone else think that practices in the food industry have gotten more careless? The amount of fruit flies has definitely increased in the past two decades. Recently I also had food moths for the first time and strange little black bugs after buying cane sugar. Apart from a moderate amount of fruit flies, I never had any of these a decade ago.
- rrgok 3y agoAny tip to ban regular flies? I hate those with my all heart. Possibly in a non disgusting way? (i.e. jar filled with dead flies to display..)
- NicoJuicy 3y agoHang out a plastic transparant bag in the sun with 75% water filled in it. Flys seem to get dizzy flying to it and turn around ( that's an explanation I came up with why it works, don't know if it's the explanation) If it's a outdoor tent, that means 4 hanging bags.
- _0ffh 3y agoI've done some experimentation in my time, and in my experience fruit flies positively love actively ongoing fermentation! So I've settled one a mixture with sugar and yeast in addition to water, surfactant and vinegar or cider. Also, trapping the little bastards is more efficient if you cover the container with cling foil and poke a hole in the middle. They'll easily get in by following the gradient of the escaping molecules, but finding the exit seems to be so much more difficult.
- assimpleaspossi 3y agoI had a fruit fly (or some kind of fly) issue a while back. Couldn't figure out where they were coming from or why. For some reason, I pulled the rubber ring out from my kitchen sink's garbage disposal. It was the nastiest thing, covered in goop. Cleaning that and the area in the disposal it sat in solved the problem.
- chickenfeed 3y agoJust been in a holiday cottage out on the exposed dales in the English peaks. And by about day four we had fruit flies. Sometimes I think they emerge from the bananas.
- lencastre 3y ago1. Glass jar with less than 1cm deep apple cider and a tiny bit of dishwasher soap, then cover the opening with that pesky plastic foil nobody likes. Poke some holes with a toothpick. 2. Shake a bit to release the cider aroma. Leave near fruit and other edibles which are covered with fruit fly eggs already when you bought them. 3. ??? 4. Profitz!!1!
- vinaypai 3y agoIt's not as interesting as keeping a bunch of carnivorous plants, but I wonder if the author considered just keeping the compost in the freezer. No smells, no bugs.
- koinedad 3y agoI’m very tempted to try this!
- TimBurman 3y ago5% acetic acid vinegar, a squirt of lemon dish soap and a few tablespoons of sugar mixed together in a bowl kills the fruit flies within a day of arrival. It will evaporate over time but adding water back to the original level reconstitutes the trap and it will work for months. This is just an interim solution until the lasers and machine vision are working.