Fruit Flies

I do not understand it, but for some reason our house is a gigantic fruit fly magnet. OK, we do consume a huge quantity of fruit, and I do tend to frequently have a bowl full of fruit out for little snackers to self-serve from. But normally you remove the fruit and the pesty flies remove themselves too. Not in our house!

Last week it got so bad that Bill actually took duct tape and tried to fashion some sort of fly trap! (It didn't work; the flies did not stick for long. But good effort!) So, our dear house is full of fruit flies. Annika likes to run around with a fly swatter and randomly swat anything and everything! Frustrated beyond belief, the other day I grabbed every possible offending item I could think of (my homemade bread (which they LOVE) candy, fruit, veggies, my kefir) and put it all in plastic bags. OK, now I have removed the offending items, those pesky critters should leave town, right? Nope.

Bill and I have been into wine lately, and we opened a new bottle. Neither one of us was impressed (I'm hard to impress, since I am only a minor fan of wines) so we corked it up and put it back on the counter. Wait, this is about fruit flies, not wine; why do I bring this up you ask? Well, those damn flies LOVED the wine! So I put a small amount in Bill's UGLY coffee cup (I really hate that stupid mug that he loves so much!) and set it in the microwave with the door open. Soon about 25 flies were in the microwave and on the mug. SLAM! I shut the door and turned on the microwave. Expecting to see popping and sizzling flies, I stood back and waited. 30 seconds, 45 seconds, one full minute, minute 30 seconds, two minutes .... finally I smelled burning smells, but saw flying and crawling flies! WOW! Those are hardy buggers! Turns out I sizzled the living daylights out of the wine - it was a crusty burnt little blob in the bottom of the glass - but half the fruit flies survived!

So the next day Bill had a glass of wine again. The remaining flies were all over his glass and the cork of the bottle. Bill reached his limit, and made the sacrifice of the remaining wine. Off went the cork, and in went the remaining fruit flies! By the next morning we had a little sludge of wine and carcasses in our bottle.

And now we are free of those pesky fruit flies.

The moral here? If you get fruit flies, buy a cheep bottle of wine, have a glass or two, and give the rest to the flies! If you like you can buy a good bottle or two, drink it up, and then you wont care if you have flies or not! BTW, I tried it with beer, and it doesn't seem to work quite as well. They must be of french heritage, not german.