Lately, I've been battling fruit flies. Leave one rotten banana on the counter and you've got a sudden, spontaneous infestation. (Where do they come from? One of the world's greatest mysteries. ) I've been leaving little traps all over the kitchen for them. If you've stumbled upon my blog in search if ways to be rid of the fruit flies in your house, here is my best advice. If you have kids (the more the better for this particular project) enlist them in running about the kitchen slapping the fruit flies to their untimely deaths. Make it a game complete with prizes. For instance, whoever racks up the greatest fruit fly death toll gets extra dessert.
I've also put red wine in bowls, luring the fruit to their death by drowning. I think drowning in red wine is not a terrible way to go? I got this idea from Wikipedia.
It is recommended that you clean your entire kitchen and under your stove and refrigerator to get rid of food bits that might be lodged there. That would help me quite a bit until tomorrow at breakfast.
Wikipedia also said that fruit flies despise honey and that I should take honey and detergent and spray it around the perimeter of my house, to which I wonder... won't that attract bears and bees and ants? (I'm especially concerned about bears. I KNOW how much bears like honey. I read that book by environmentalist A.A. Milne.)
Then, there's the whole explaining to the neighbors, WHO ARE ALWAYS OUTSIDE, what I am doing. I may as well put a big sign on myself saying "I am a gross person who cannot maintain a level of cleanliness that keeps away bugs. Please judge me."
I have to go now. It's time to mush up a banana and stick in a cup and put saran wrap over it. Then I shall poke numerous holes in said saran wrap. The flies will get in, but won't be able to get out. Tonight I'm a diabolical killer engaged in multiple first-degree murder plots.
Be thankful a BB gun have I not.
3 comments:
Certainly you must know about wrapping the stalk end of the banana-bunch with saran wrap to suffocate the little ectothermic drosophila melanogaster? :^D
Common practice among those that live with bananas all the year...
I did not know that sneaky tip! Thank you, fellow maniacal killer.
Yeah, they lay their eggs in the stalk end og the banana cluster, in the little microscopic tube openings. Currently I am battling the red lily-leaf beetle in the garden. Sam egg-laying style, voracious leaf and flower eating abilities and beautiful deep red carapace.
I tried putting them all in a can and lighting them on fire. It works, and is satisfying, but it's too much work. So now I collect as many as I can in a plastic take out container from the Wegmans mediteranean bar, run scalding water on them and put them down the garbage disposal.
Their numbers have dwindled until this morning there were none at all. Of course, there are also nearly no lilies at all. So now begins the prophylactic soil and stalk egg extermination phase.
Are these sins? Why doesn't lily have three L's?
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