Catching fruit flies.

[SirJoe]

What do you use to catch fruit flies, I normally use cider vinegar but I have seen people using beer. What do you use?

 

[rz3300]

Well I really wish that I would have come here a while ago. This summer was particularly bad for me with the fruit flies, and I swear even I had a banana peel in the room for five minutes they were already making their way in. I did make the horrible mistake of throwing away an apple core early on, and that really just got the whole infestation set in motion. Live and learn, I suppose, but I seem to do this every year. I usually go with the apple cider vinegar trap, but it really did not work well for me this year so I just had to deep clean and wait them out. Hope you have better luck than I did.

 

[Chuck]

I drench the soil with spinosad and don't have them

 

[Corzhens]

We seldom have lots of fruit flies here. They appear only for a short time during summer. But when they do, we are on the lookout because they might ravage some of our plants. We use a plastic bottle with an elongated hole that we fill with special vinegar called Sukang Iloko. It is similar to cider which has a very attractive scent to the insects. When placed in the garden, the fruit flies get inside the bottle and drown in the vinegar. That's it.

 

[17emilyhalko]

Apple cider vinegar does wonders for us over here! We don't only use apple cider vinegar, but we take a mason jar and make a cone with a piece of paper, so that the tip of the cone is small, but large enough for the fruit flies to get through, and then we place the small side of the cone in the mason jar. This works as a trap! For some reason, many fruit flies can't figure how to get back out.... I'd imagine that this would work better if you used something other than regular paper for the cone, like something that was sticky, though I've never tried.

 

[remnant]

A reliable method is to wrap the fruits with a polythene bag which should also be transparent to prevent scorching in the hot sun. Holes should be pocked on the sides of the polythene bags to prevent build up of moisture and heat. This method is labour intensive and requires patience but once implemented, you don't have to worry about the pests anymore.

 

[waretrop]

Fruit flies or fungus gnats. The first comes into your house on fruit from grocery stores the the other comes from retail stores and greenhouses.

Fruit flies lay eggs on fruit at stores and you bring them home and don't wash them. Then they hatch. I wash all fruit the minute they come into my house...

Fungus gnats live in very very wet soil and live on the decomposing stuff in potted plants. They need moisture.

Either way, you can use 1 inch cider vinegar in one solo glass. Put them near where you have the problem. I like clear so I can watch them better. Saran warp over the top taped or rubber banded around the lip. Poke holes, the size of lead to a pencil, in the Saran wrap and set somewhere off the side. They will crawl into the holes and not be able to get out and drown.

It is a natural way to get rid of them and may take weeks bit works.I wash all fruit coming into the house and I watch the air while shopping for plants. If you see one little fly running around, when you take a plant home from that place quarantine the plant, put it in a clear plastic bag with the solo cup method sitting in the bag also. Seal it. You can see the bugs going into the cup as days go by.

The moral to this story is to always wash fruit and watch new plants as not to reinfect. It's a pain but fun to see them get caught.