Die, evil vermin!

Autumn at our house almost always means harvest, and food preservation typically follows. Unfortunately, along with the boxes of tomatoes, buckets of garlic, and oodles of other fruits & veggies come the fruit flies. I can tolerate a couple of flies, but when they reach critical mass, I start exclaiming things like “Die, evil vermin” as I dash through the kitchen clapping my hands and hoping to smash enough of them to make a dent in the population.

In case you’re wondering, killing them by hand does not work. I decided to do some research and see what does work. We had originally thought putting out a glass of wine would work well simply because it’s hard to have a glass of wine around here without a few floaters (or “wee bastards” as we often call them). According to wikiHow, however, plain wine or vinegar won’t due–you need to add a little dish soap to break the surface tension of the wine, thus making the little critters fall in and drown.

They also suggested a few other traps. So a few nights ago, I put out several of their traps to see which one caught the most flies. The results surprised me.

Here are the traps I made, and the number of flies they killed:

1. Control – I was very Science Fair about this. I used all the same sized glasses for my traps and did one with plain old water as a control. It didn’t catch any flies, as expected.

2. Plain wine – This one caught three flies in about 24 hours. Fruit flies must like wine glasses better than the regular old water glasses I used, because I think I currently have more than three flies in my wine glass and it’s only been sitting here for 5 minutes.
3. Wine plus soap – Allegedly, the soap reduces surface tension of the wine, so the little buggers drown when they fall in. Maybe it’s because I used the disgusting-smelling Cucumber dish soap that I recently bought by accident, but I didn’t get a single fly in this trap.
4. Last night’s bloody mary – OK, this one wasn’t really a trap, just further proof that I’m a slob. But it did trap three flies.
5. Wine plus fruit with plastic wrap – This trap is supposed to keep the flies from escaping once they crawl through the holes in the plastic wrap. All it did for me was keep the flies out. Four flies.
6. Ziploc bag with fruit – This didn’t work at all. No flies.
7. Nasty TAT fly paper – We had one of these on hand, and although it did catch a full-sized house fly, it only caught eight fruit flies. Better than wine, but not even close to the winner, which was…
8. Apple cider vinegar – This was the overwhelming winner with at least 12 flies in it. I’m no math major, but this seems like a statistically significant improvement over any of the other traps.

So there you have it, folks. For those of you who chimed in when I tweeted about fruit flies, you have your solution – a cup with an inch or so of apple cider vinegar in it will capture the most flies. So throw your fruit in the fridge, banish the compost bin to the garage or back porch until the first frost, put out a trap and watch with glee as the little bastards die, die, die! walk away. When you return, the flies will be gone!