How to safely and effectively get rid of a fruit fly in an apartment?

A fruit fly is a small, harmless insect, but finding it in a house is always unpleasant. Attracted by her smell of spoiled fruit, nectar in the flowers of indoor plants. In the warm season, Drosophila can fly into a living room from the street, if you simply spray the room with an air freshener with a berry or fruity aroma. How to get rid of fruit flies in an apartment? What tools should be used?

Where do Drosophila come from in the house?

There are several ways to enter the apartment at the front sight:

1. The insect chooses soft, slightly or badly spoiled fruits as a place for laying eggs, as their skin is easier to bite. Since the fly itself and its eggs are small, it is almost impossible to notice that a vegetable or fruit is infected.
2. Larvae and eggs of a fly can appear in the house along with soil for indoor plants.
3. Opened windows without mosquito nets or open doors are another way by which an insect can get into the apartment. Cats fly to the smell of fruits, potted plants or spoiled food.

Where to look for fruit fly larvae in an apartment?

To get rid of these small insects, it is not enough just to destroy adults - Drosophila actively breed, the female is able to lay about 20 eggs in 1 time, and in 2 months (this is the life span of an adult insect) she can produce up to 2000 eggs. Insects hatch in the early morning, and already after 8 hours after this, the female is ready to breed. If the fight against Drosophila is not started in time, it will easily fill the whole house.

The most common midges habitats:

1. A trash can or a bowl of pet food - this is where optimal conditions are created for laying eggs and the accumulation of adult insects, because there is no shortage of food in this place.
2. Pots with potted flowers. Wet ground, fallen leaves, starting to rot, are also attractive to an insect.
3. Storage locations for fruits and vegetables. If there are several fruits in the container, one of them may begin to deteriorate earlier than the others, and the flies will certainly smell.

Are Drosophila harmful?

In fact, fruit flies do not cause much damage: they do not have the slightest interest in a person or an animal, do not bite them, or carry dangerous diseases. The only, and even then hardly possible, threat is the risk of an upset bowel. Such a probability exists if you eat a fruit infected with larvae.

How to deal with a fruit fly?

Having noticed the appearance of uninvited guests in the house, you need to carefully inspect the apartment and find all the spoiled food: fruit forgotten on the table, sour food leftovers in the bin, pet food spoiled in the heat in a bowl. If tea leaves are used as dressing for indoor flowers, you need to examine the pots with the ground.

All possible sources of Drosophila appearing must be disposed of immediately by sending them to the trash.Storage containers for fruits and vegetables should be thoroughly washed to remove invisible larvae and eggs from surfaces.

Flowers need to be transplanted into pots with fresh soil. If part of the leaves or flowers of the plant began to rot, they are removed. Indoor plants themselves are often watered, but little by little - waterlogged soil lures midges.

Folk methods

To clean the apartment from midges, you can build traps yourself:

1. Since one of Drosophila’s favorite treats is banana, it can be used as a bait. Peel the fruit, put it in a plastic bag or a plastic bottle. Using a toothpick, several holes are made in polyethylene or plastic. Leave a trap near the habitat of midges. Over the next 2 days, a significant part of the midges will fly inside, but they will not be able to get out.
2. No less than bananas, the fruit fly of Drosophila loves honey, fruit juice or apple cider vinegar. They make a trap like this: take a deep container, pour one of the listed liquids there, cover with a bag or cling film. Make a toothpick hole. Attracted by the smell of insects will climb into a trap.
3. Another possible option is to use a glass jar. At the bottom of it put a slice of banana, orange or any spoiled fruit. A cone with a small hole at the top is made of a sheet of paper. Turning it over, insert the workpiece into the throat of the bottle. The moths easily penetrate inside the can, but they cannot fly back.
4. Beer diluted with sugar and yeast water is poured into a disposable cup and left near the accumulation of insects. Hearing a tempting smell, midges fly on him and drown.

In addition to traps, you can use other means.

Smoking

The crushed hard camphor is placed on an old frying pan (one that you will not mind throwing out), put on fire. As soon as the pan becomes hot and steam goes, the container is carried through all the rooms of the apartment. For a person, the resulting smoke is not dangerous, but the midges will not tolerate it.

Poison for midges

A couple of insect poison treats recipes:

1. ½ cup milk is mixed with 40 g of sugar and the same amount of ground black pepper. In a liquid soak a paper towel or a piece of toilet paper, put on a plate next to midges. After some time, there will be no insects.
2. 10 g of honey are combined with 1 g of saccharin, a napkin is moistened with this composition. Lay on the windowsill.

A vacuum cleaner

The place in which midges have accumulated is treated with a vacuum cleaner. A working unit will draw in insects by locking them in a dust bag. Empty the container outside the apartment.

Cold

Drosophila are very sensitive to temperature, hypothermia is fatal for them. If they attacked the apartment in the winter, just leave the window in the kitchen open, leaving home. After a few hours, all the flies will die.

In this way, it is possible to destroy already adults, but if larvae remain somewhere, then in time the insects will reappear. To prevent this, it is recommended to thoroughly wash the bin and pet bowl, pour the earth in flower pots with a solution of manganese.

Potassium permanganate or matches

This method is suitable if the flies are wound on a plant. A weak solution of manganese is prepared, and flowers are treated with it twice a month.

You can also use ordinary matches: they are stuck head down into the ground in a pot. Sulfur from the match will destroy the larvae.

Geranium

Fruit flies do not tolerate the smell of geraniums. If midges are wound up in the kitchen, you need to get rid of spoiled fruits and put a pot with this plant on the windowsill of the room.

Garlic

They do not like midges and the smell of garlic, therefore, it helps to lay out the chopped head near the habitat of Drosophila. After a few hours, there will be no insects.

Orange and clove

A spice stick is inserted into the peel of the orange, placed next to the place where the midges gather.

Shop Facilities

How to get rid of fruit flies if there is no time to mess with the construction of traps or the preparation of poisonous compounds? Ready-made traps or drugs can be used.

Manufacturers offer a choice of:

1. Repellents. Chemical-impregnated tapes that emit insect poisonous vapors. Such funds cannot be called completely safe for humans - the room in which the tape is located must be aired.
2. Sprays Special fluids containing fatty acids, falling on larvae and insects, destroy them. For humans are not dangerous.
3. Zappers. Modern devices that affect insects with electricity. The only drawback of some models is their high power consumption.
4. Traps. Traps manufactured by the factory method do not contain poison, most of them use insect-luring agents, and the midge that has flown into the trap dies of hunger, failing to get out. You can put such devices even in the kitchen, without fear that they will harm a person or an animal.

Preventative measures

It is not difficult to prevent the appearance of Drosophila in the apartment, it is enough:

• keep clean;
• regularly (at least 1 time per day) to take out a bucket;
• wash dishes immediately after a meal;
• spoiled fruits immediately throw away;
• Do not leave food in the pet's bowl for a long time, remove it immediately as the animal eats.

If midges have nothing to eat, they will not appear in the apartment.

Even if midges are wound up in the apartment, you should not immediately rush to the store for chemicals - you can get rid of them and folk wayswithout the use of toxic substances.