Fruit flies driving you bananas? Here’s how to get rid of them from your Kentucky home
In the late summer and early fall, when they’re most common in Kentucky, fruit flies can become a menace.
They seem to spawn out of nowhere, and that’s a credit to their keen sense of smell, though they don’t detect scents the way we do.
At times, fruit flies can be hard to get rid of. If you’re worried about protecting your Kentucky home from the pesky insects, we’ve rounded up some information on how to prevent an infestation and what to do if they’ve already found their way inside.
What attracts fruit flies to your home?
For fruit flies, or Drosophila melanogaster, it’s the smell of fermentation and decay that draws them in. It could be those ripening bananas sitting on your kitchen counter, a glass of red wine you just poured or the scum in your drain.
If they’re not already in your home (which they very likely are) these little insects will slip through cracks in your window screens or the fine mesh itself and follow the scent they detect with their two antennas. Only having about 100,000 neurons to a human’s 86 billion, fruit flies have a brain the size of a poppy seed.
Despite their size, fruit flies can travel up to about 9 miles a day, or 6 million times their body length. For a human, that’s like traveling 6,000 miles for a food source.
“They’re looking for a place to lay their eggs and for their eggs to develop, and that’s going to be this over-ripening fruit,” said Zachary DeVries, assistant professor of urban entomology at the University of Kentucky.
This is where things quickly get out of hand. A single female fruit fly can deposit as many as 500 eggs onto those over-ripe tomatoes a friend brought you from their garden.
“Within just a little over a week … the eggs will hatch,” DeVries said. “Anything that’s rotting is fair game. The larvae will feed on that yeast.”
One week becomes two (maybe you’re away on vacation) and you return to a fruit fly metropolis in your kitchen.
How do you get rid of fruit flies?
Fortunately, according to DeVries, the solution is straightforward: get rid of the food source.
“You have to go find where they’re coming from. You have to really do your due diligence,” DeVries said.
That could be as easy as tossing out the spoiled fruit on your counter or may involve searching through your cabinets for old potatoes or onions.
“There are some times where they can get into drain scum,” DeVries said.
In that case, according to UK Entomology, tape a clear plastic food storage bag over the drain. If flies are breeding in the drain, the adults will emerge and be trapped in the bag.
Once you’ve confirmed their presence, dump boiling water down the drain to kill off any adults and their eggs. Repeat every few days over the course of a week to kill any future generations that happen to get a foothold down there.
You shouldn’t need to reach for any insecticides to deal with an infestation either, DeVries said.
One approach is to punch a few holes in the top of a jar filled with apple cider vinegar and a few drops of dish soap. The jar should soon fill up with drowned fruit flies. You can build another trap by rolling a piece of paper into a cone and using a jar to contain the insects once they fly in.
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This story was originally published August 8, 2023 at 11:18 AM.