Hints on making homemade fruit fly trap

In the past, I never considered fruit flies to be a problem in our home. Afterall, any animal restricted to a fruit diet has to be harmless. That is not the case for houseflies and their kin. They eat everything. They must remain outside our home.

Now here is an interesting story about the fruit fly. During breakfast, I spread a thin layer of butter on a slice of home-made bread. Within a millisecond, a fruit fly landed in the middle of the butter. Seemingly, the fly and I stared at one another for a second or two until my mind shifted to other subjects.

Moments later, I assumed the fruit fly had gone its own way, so I took a delicious bite. It never dawned on me that I might have eaten a fruit fly.

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Unaware to me, however, my wife observed the entire event. Her comments: “You amaze me. You won’t walk barefoot on our floors or eat a morsel of food without scrubbing your hands thoroughly, but you will eat a butter-soaked fruit fly. That’s OK. You need the proteins.”

Actually, Marjorie has a great dislike for fruit flies and swings at them with bare hands or with any object she can use as a weapon. I know when to duck.

But, I continued to say good things about fruit flies.

One day, however, because of the continuous comments I heard from my wife and other family members, I decided to conduct research about those flies. I was surprised about what I read.

Both sexes of fruit flies are about the same size. They are similar in appearance to a housefly, but much smaller.

Unlike houseflies, fruit flies are colorful. Both sexes display attractive yellow body coloration with a small number of black stripes running crossways on their abdomen. Their eyes are a bright red.

The female fruit fly can choose her mate. If she dislikes the one heading her direction with courtship on his mind, she simply gives him a swift kick and goes about her own merry way.

When she selects a male suitor, he plays her a love song by vibrating his wings. They have four stages in the life cycle resulting from the copulatory events of their relationship; therefore, from each event, fertilized eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults are produced.

Now, if we capture every visible flying fruit fly in our home, from that relationship, we still cannot clap our hands and assume victory.

Here is the problem. There are all sorts of satisfactory copulatory areas that lead to successful four-stage cycles. All those life stages originate from single eggs. Such sites include drains of sinks, garbage disposals, wet mops and rags, residual liquids in drinking glasses, and other similar sites.

The cycle ends and begins with adults. If we kill an adult from one area, other adults will hatch from other areas.

Now, do we mind if one of those fruit flies lands on the ripened banana we are about to munch on?

So how do we get rid of fruit flies without the use of dangerous pesticides? First of all, thoroughly clean all potential breeding sites. Next, search the literature for homemade traps to capture fruit flies.

Here is one example:

Make a funnel from an 8 1/2-by-11 inch piece of paper. Allow a small opening to exist at one end of the funnel, just large enough for a fruit fly to enter. The other end of the funnel should be wide as possible to still allow the paper to maintain the shape of a funnel.

Place the funnel in an empty drinking glass or glass fruit jar with the small opening facing downward. Position a small amount of a ripened banana just below the small opening in the funnel.

Fruit flies will enter the glass container through the funnel, but they cannot escape.

Place the trap in a freezer to kill all the flies.

Next, remove the frozen flies and recharge the trap. Even if you don’t win, have fun trying.

Portales’ Tony Gennaro is a desert biologist. Contact him at: [email protected]