It’s a fact of life – if you raise composting worms or keep compost in a container on your counter, you will get fruit flies at some point. Even if you just have a fly or two at first, you will end up with many, many flies because they can lay up to 500 eggs at a time. And as any good geneticist knows, fruit flies conveniently have a week-long life span. So you can end up with a very big fruit fly issue in a very short period of time.
Last summer, we ended up with a very big fruit fly problem, mainly because I put more food in the worm bin than they were capable of eating in a short time period. I tried to cover up the food in the bin with newspaper, as the flies won’t burrow down into paper to get to the food, but the flies weren’t dispersing. Instead, they only seemed to be multiplying, with this constant nagging of a fly near you at all times!
After checking out a couple different fruit fly traps, I have come up with what I believe to be the ultimate one. Between the two traps in the kitchen and basement, we haven’t had any outbreaks and have only seen a singular fly or two since then. On the other hand, there are quite a few dead in the bottom of the traps. Plus, the trap doesn’t look on the counter and blends in, as long as no one tries to take a swig from it.
1) Get a wine bottle with about an inch of wine left in it. If you don’t drink wine, see if you can get a wine bottle from a friend, because it’s the perfect shape. Having some of the wine itself is important because the sweet smell attracts the flies.
2) Add a couple squirts of soap. When the flies fly down to the wine, they get stuck in the soap.
3) Roll a small piece of paper into a funnel.
4) Stick the funnel in the wine bottle. The funnel makes the entrance into the wine bottle wider. Then, when the fly flies down into the funnel and into the wine bottle, it can’t find the way back out and gets stuck.
Here’s the final result:
I hope you don’t ever have to deal with fruit flies, but if you do, this is a surefire solution.
Will Bike for Change (or Pie!) 