Friday, September 21, 2012

Fruit Fly Invasion



     Are you looking for a natural remedy to catch and rid your house of fruit flies? Summer time calls for open windows and lots of fresh fruit stacked up in the fruit bowl. This is the perfect calling card for those pesky buggers to come a knocking. They won’t ring your doorbell and they won’t wait for an invitation. These pests can detect fermenting fruit from great distances and can easily fit between the mesh of your screens. You wake up one morning and BAM! Your kitchen is swarming .

     The fermenting fruit creates yeast that the fruit flies needs to lay their eggs in. As much of an annoyance that this may be, these little guys are just doing what they are programmed to do: Eat, and make little babies. It’s nature in her finest. It’s the Circle of Life (Sing with me Elton).

     You can avoid this infestation by simply keeping your fruit in the refrigerator. But in our house, we have four mouths to feed and we keep lots of fruit on hand. We leave our fruit out on the counter top so the children have easy access to all those vitamins and minerals. 

     We keep the fruit flies a bay by placing our traps on the counter about 12-24 inches away from the fruit. In a small cup put one teaspoon of Bragg’s apple cider vinegar. Add to it a shot of water and one drop of dish-washing liquid. Cover the top of the cup with some plastic wrap and poke holes in the top with a sharp pencil. The rest is history.

     The fruit flies will be attracted to the fermented apples and find their way into the cup. Once inside, they can’t escape and will eventually fall into the mixture, become trapped, and drown. If you are an animal lover or Buddhist and cannot fathom the idea of killing fruit flies, do what I do. I pretend I am a bat and convince myself that I would have eaten them anyway. Survival of the fittest.

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