Don’t Drink and Fly

Before Susan leaves for one of her out-of-town work trips she stocks our kitchen to the brim with things the kids and I would never eat. It’s a motherly thing — I get it. She doesn’t want to leave the kitchen bare and so she spends a bunch of money on breakfast cereals, easy-to-prepare meals and a wide selection of fruit. While she’s away the kids get McDonald’s for breakfast, fast food for dinner and popcicles for snacks. Susan’s well-meaning rations generally sit untouched until her return, at which point the boxed and canned stuff eventually gets prepared and the fruit gets tossed.

The apples and bananas Susan brought home the week before last were riper than usual, and because of this they attracted fruit flies. As the week went on the problem got worse. There were tiny fruit flies (or were they gnats?) in the sink, in the cupboard, and buzzing all around the fruit.

I checked Google and found an easy way to get rid of fruit flies. The page I read said to put vinegar in a bowl and set it out on your counter. I did that before going to bed one night, and within a day or two my fruit fly problem had multiplied ten-fold. Turns out, there was a second page that I neglected to read. I missed the whole part about how to kill them; all I had done was attract more. I had put out an inviting feast for the little buggers. “Come on in, the vinegar’s fine!”

Now that you could barely walk through the kitchen without seeing or touching a fruit fly, I went back to the Internet and found a method for getting rid of fruit flies. The method I read sounded so stupid that I just had to try it. I found a hundred variations of the method, but they are all essentially the same: take a glass, put something sweet in the bottom of it, and put something across the top that allows the fruit flies to go in, but not come out. I found multiple suggestions for the something sweet, the most common being wine or fruit. As for the trap part, there were two common suggestions. The first involves putting saran wrap over the top of your cup or bowl and punching holes in it. The second involves using a funnel or a paper cone. The flies are attracted to the sweet smell and fly down into the bowl or cup and then can’t find their way out.

Really? This sounded kind of stupid to me. Are flies really that stupid that they would fly down a funnel and not be able to find their way back out?

Turns out, they are. After a little experimentation with just saran wrap, here’s my final trap.

The bottom inch of the cup is filled with wine (well, Boones Farm — it’s what we had on hand, and the flies didn’t deserve any better). Since I was serving wine I used my old Cheers glass. I also read that a drop of dishwashing liquid breaks the wine’s surface tension and helps the flies stick and drown — I don’t know if that’s true, but I decided it couldn’t hurt so I squirted a little Palmolive in there for good measure. I covered the top of the glass with saran wrap to make a tight seal (I’m not even sure that was necessary, to be honest), poked a small hole in the top, and shoved the plastic funnel through the hole. I sat the contraption on the counter top next to the sink overnight, and the next morning here’s what I found.

My little “wine swimming pool of death” actually worked! The kitchen is almost completely fruit fly free! Fantastic! The few I’ve seen seem to be coming from the pantry, which is where the death trap has been relocated.

I should note that before using the funnel, I simply tried covering the bowl full of vinegar with saran wrap and punching holes in it. I caught a few that way but I wasn’t sure if my holes were too big, or not nig enough. The funnel made things a lot simpler. Originally I was afraid the hole in the bottom of the funnel (which is quite large; I can easily stick my pinky through it) would be too big and the flies would just leave, but that turned out not to be the case.

Google 1, Fruit Flies 0.