apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I need to try this - I could use one in the office too!

Once the jar is full, you can add a finely-chopped onion and some foie gras, and you'll have an awesome vinegar fruitfly pâté...

(...kidding!!)

Yummy!!!! :-)

I've tried this before - it totally doesn't work.

add soap to the mix, then the surface tension is gone and the flies drown and don't come right back out again.

stale beer works pretty good too.

you CAN catch more flies with vinegar than with honey.

uh, that sounds kind of, what's the word, gross.

I keep a clean home so I don't have pesky fruit flys.

I keep a clean home too, but in my sub-tropical climate fruit flies are an unfortunate fact of life. Along with huge roaches.

I'm willing to try anything since nothing up 'til now has worked.

Sciencegeek is right about the soap! You don't even need the paper tube...the little suckers just drown!

OR put the mixture in a wine bottle - it doesn't scream "I've got a disgusting fruit fly problem"

You can dilute it with quite a bit of water, too.

(Can you tell I had a problem with this last year?)

Great idea! Got anything to help with ants?

I've found that apple cider vinegar worked a lot better then the plain stuff, I think it's more fruity which they obviously like.

When I went camping and didn't want to be fumigated, I put little piles of sugar a few feet away from the tent. All the ants went there for lunch instead of searching my tent. For in the house you can try boric acid (clothes washing powder) along the base boards or where ever they are. Not for use on kitchen cabinets.

I like to get a bottle of red wine and leave an inch or in the bottle. They can't get up the neck and the dark bottle hides the grody flies better. I get them bad in this apartment every August and this really works!

Yeah, the vinegar or wine makes fruit flies.
Can't deal with that.

This definitely works. I used to work in a fruit fly lab, and we had funnel traps like this set up all over the place to catch escaped flies. Just make sure that the hole at the bottom of the funnel isn't too big (1 cm is fine).

Piachika, they say you can sprinkle a bit of corn mean on the area that the ants like and that will do the trick.

can you just use a funnel? how does the soap part work?

The soap gets rid of the surface tension. Without the surface tension on the water, the fruit flies fall in and drown.

You could use a funnel, but I'm sure you have some paper in the recycling bin which can be made to fit your bottle/jar/wine bottle perfectly.

I work in a lab. We used to be down the hall from a fruit fly lab and used this trick to get rid of the escapees.

If you don't like the grossness, cover the bottle or jar with something opaque. I'm sure you guys have some fancy paper laying around somewhere. Or contact paper.

Thanks - I'm going to try the soap! Thanks to this same AT posting last year, my apartment was blissfully free of fruit files. Downtown SF has billions of fruit flies in the summer.

i do research in a fruit fly lab and we have these all over the lab to catch rogue flies. we also add yeast to the jars too to attract the flies.

um.. are fruit fly labs really common? cuz so far 3 people have mentioned working in or near one. i feel like i'm missing out.

I've used open beer bottles to catch fruit flys. Good to know that I have other options.

It works -really- well. I've been inundated this year in Seattle; we've had such unusually warm weather all this summer, and buying your fruit at a fruitstand means that you also buy a few fruit flies with each haul home.

I got completely fed up today while making jam that I put one of these funnels out and there's about twenty-five of the little buggers crawling around inside right now. I think next time I'm going to have to drop some soap in, cause bugs crawling around in a glass totally grosses me out.