Fruit Flies, Oh My!

For the last two weeks, we have been fighting a minor fruit fly infestation at our house. When I first spotted them, they were milling about apples in a glass bowl on my counter. Since we had recently gone apple picking, I assumed that they arrived on one of the apples that we picked in the orchard. I washed all of the apples and put them in the fridge so that the fruit flies would no longer have their food source. For the next few days, I sprayed them and clapped them to death with my hands. Over time though, the number seemed to be increasing and they had spread from the kitchen to my upstairs hall bathroom. I searched and searched for a lost potato that may have rolled under the cabinet or a piece of wayward food that ended up underneath the baseboard heater and I could find absolutely nothing. Since I pay a cleaning lady, I'd actually have been mad if I found something somewhere, but her job is safe as nothing was found, that was until....

One night, hubby was walking through the dining room and yelled into the kitchen that the dining room "smelled old." Mind you, my dining room is the one room in my house that is so never used that I'm even contemplating turning it into a sitting room or den. Well, I went in to see what he meant by "it smells old" and when I flicked on the light, I saw a mass of fruit flies hovering over my beaded fruit centerpiece. It turns out that Miss E had placed an orange in the centerpiece at some point and that orange was now serving as the official Fruit Fly Conference Hotel. I ran for the can of bug spray and sprayed it so long that the can became too cold to hold, my finger hurt from pressing the nozzle, and my throat was irritated. The Hotel del'Orange was moved outside in the backyard and it sits there still.

Unfortunately, that has not completely solved the problem. We still have about a half dozen survivor fruit flies flying around looking for a new hotel, although their flying speed has slowed so they are getting hungry, LOL. (By the way, did you know that fruit flies have red eyes?)