How to Fight An Entire Army, On Your Own, And Win.
An army of fruit flies, that is.
When I was drinking heavily, I used to put the empty bottles back in the cases, and they would sit by the back door in the kitchen. When noticing a few fruit flies around, I didn’t do much, but eventually I decided to get rid of the bottles. Then the outbreak came. I looked up online to see how this happened and how I could deal with it, and apparently, getting rid of fruit flies is tough work. But I didn’t want to have to call an exterminator, so I tried it on my own.
The first thing to do is to educate oneself on the insect itself. Forget trying to kill them one by one. There are way too many, and while they look like clumsy fliers, fruit flies are far from clumsy. They can change their speed from near hovering to something that almost looks like they are teleporting.
Fruit flies are real Vikings. Even in the middle of Winter, (which, at the time, it was) they can survive as long as they stay indoors.
A fruit fly doesn’t live very long, about a month. The female can lay 400 eggs after one mating session, and new fruit flies appear only after a few days. Female fruit flies also store extra sperm from the male, so, basically, they only need to mate once or twice, but can lay eggs many more times than that. So this is why getting rid of them can be hard.
Where to find the eggs? Well, if you’re filthy, they can lay eggs in decaying matter, overripe fruit, or the accumulation of sugar and alcohol from beer or wine. They like moisture, so fruit flies in a clean home will evacuate in drains. That’s why they’re hardcore. Water goes down the drain all the time, but that doesn’t kill the eggs.
So by getting rid of the bottles, I pissed them off, and they were everywhere. I located where they would go, and attacked those places. I never let a single dish or cup sit on the counter, washed everything right away, and cleaned the counter and table like five times a day, with products. Same for the bathroom. Three times a day, I boiled water, and poured it down all drains; kitchen and bathroom sinks and the tub. (plenty of them hung around in the bathroom too)
But then you have to trap them. Sneaky buggers just won’t give up that easily. I made traps. Margarine containers in which I put just a little beer in, and then covered the container tightly with saranwrap. Then poke little holes on top with the tip of a knife. After attacking all their nesting and feeding places, the flies go nuts and desperate, and they easily took to the traps. Now the traps take a few days to work; these flies like rotten and spoiled stuff, so you have to give time for the beer in the traps to loop slightly. You can also substitute beer for wine, which is stronger and should act faster, or you can use fruit.
I had two traps, one in the kitchen, one in the bathroom. For some reason, the flies will go in, but they can’t come out. Or most of them anyway. I closely observed one fly that went in, crawled around and then flew back out. But most will end up drowning in the beer.
Warning; it gets pretty disgusting. Before you know it, there will literally be hundreds of fruit flies dead, floating in the beer. I checked on the traps every now and then, and accelerated the death by swishing around the beer in the container, and therefore drowning the live flies inside, which may have been crawling on the side of the container. I replaced both traps once.
Since it was Winter, I also made a sacrifice; I opened up all the windows. It was severely cold in my place, but the flies took a tremendous hit from this. The whole process took about seven days, and I beat the flies. Never saw them again.
Well, at least I thought it would have been hard to get rid of them, but if you’re vigilant, it’s no harder than keeping up a strict routine, which gets rather easy when it starts working. At first I think I even took a psychologically traumatic hit from this; everytime you eat, fruit flies come. Everytime you have a beer, three or four end up floating in it. They go on your TV screen, they come out of your towel or bath scrunchies, they hang around on walls…I was like, AAAAAAAHH. Lol. But when you see them beaten down, it encourages you a lot.
And I also know how to quickly pour a glass or mug of beer/other fizzy drinks without them fizzing over, ever. Being a waitress and a drinker teaches you this. However it would be way easier to show you how to do it than to explain it. But three important things; it depends on the type of glass it’s going in, and at what angle said glass is when you pour, and how fast/slow you pour it. Now everyone can do it slow, but doing it fast is something else.
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