Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2022724118

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!"

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

I love that the adage "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar" is literally false.

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.

That’s just what happens when you leave fruit and food scraps out.