So you walked into the kitchen the other day to get a banana, only to find your bananas are covered with a bunch of tiny flies. It isn’t the first time that you’ve had fruit flies show up in your house, but you’re really sick of it happening.
It’s time to get rid of fruit flies in your kitchen. But honestly, you’re not sure of the best way to do so. After all, you’re not even sure why they show up in the first place. Well, let’s take care of this problem with a look at how fruit flies show up in your home in the first place and how you can use DIY methods and professional pest control to get rid of fruit flies.
Why Fruit Flies Come in Your Home
Fruit flies are attracted to fruit, as their name suggests. In particular, fruit flies prefer fruit that is beginning to rot or is fully rotten. Now, even though fruit flies do like fruit, they do also like other rotten things as well. So if you have any damp or moldy places in your home, fruit flies will likely be attracted to those as well.
Without sources of food like rotten fruits or mildew, fruit flies wouldn’t have much reason to be in your home. However, they also sometimes end up in your home simply because they flew in through a door or were brought in with produce from the store or garden.
Luckily, fruit flies are not very dangerous to humans. They won’t bite you or sting you, but it is possible for them to track diseases onto your food or other surfaces in your home, just like any other fly. So while you do need to do your best to keep fruit flies from contaminating food sources in your home, you don’t need to worry about more of a threat than that. But if you really want to make sure that you and your family are safe from diseases carried by flies, you’ll want to use professional pest control to give you an extra layer of protection.
How to Get Rid of Fruit Flies
Clean Up Dishes and Food
Because fruit flies are so attracted to food, and to rotten food in particular, one of the best ways to get rid of fruit flies is to make sure that any food that’s been sitting out is put away or thrown away. If the flies can’t smell the food or can’t access it, they will have almost no reason to linger in your home.
Even if you don’t have a lot of food sitting out in your kitchen, it’s possible that the flies are also being attracted to your kitchen sink. If you often have dishes sitting in the sink with crumbs or water, that can be enough to attract the fruit flies. Remember, they’re attracted to rotten food sources, so if water or crumbs are sitting out in your sink, the flies may think that that is a great source of food for them.
Take Out the Trash Often
One of the smelliest things in the house is often the kitchen trash. That’s because leftover food, fruit peels, and food packaging are tossed in there and quickly begin to rot. Even though we don’t like the smell, fruit flies are highly attracted to smells like kitchen trash cans. And if it does start to go rotten in the trash, then the trash can becomes almost a paradise for the fruit flies.
So when you start to see fruit flies in your kitchen, one of the best things you can do to get rid of them is to also get rid of your trash. Getting rid of your trash may not get rid of all of the fruit flies, but once their source of food is taken away, the flies have much less reason to be in your home.
If you want to make sure that fruit flies won’t be attracted to your home because of your kitchen trash, then you may want to get a kitchen trash can with a lid. The lid will help block the smell and limit the number of fruit flies that can find their way to your trash.
Put Out Traps
Another way to get rid of fruit flies in your home is to put out traps. You can buy traps at the store, such as sticky traps, to try and catch fruit flies, but you can also try DIY traps instead.
Typically fruit fly traps are designed to lure the fly into a container that it cannot find its way out of. For example, you could set up a jar with apple cider vinegar in it, and then roll a piece of paper into a cone that sits in the opening of the jar. The flies can easily find their way into the wide opening of the cone, but once they crawl into the jar through the narrow opening of the cone, they have a much harder time getting out. After a time, the flies will die in the jar.
As helpful as these traps can be, they still won’t completely get rid of the problem. Because fruit flies have a short lifespan in which to reproduce, there’s a good chance that they will lay eggs in your home if they come inside. These eggs will be hard to find, and no traps will get rid of them. So if you’ve had any significant number of fruit flies in your home, you’ll want to call professional pest control to help you completely get rid of the problem.
Call Professional Pest Control for Help
As much as you may want to take care of pest problems on your own, professional pest control companies have the resources and training to know how to completely get rid of pests. They know where to find pests and their eggs, and they have the best available treatments to get rid of and prevent pests from coming into your home.
Calling professional pest control for help is probably the best thing you can do to keep your home pest-free and safe for your family. If you’ve been dealing with fruit flies or other pest problems in your home, it’s time to start looking for local pest control to help you out.