I hate fruit flies. They’re everywhere. In everything. I’m cleaning everything, setting out death traps, no matter how clean & tidy though, the sight of them makes me feel like I’m living in a dump. Or visiting filthy restaurants. Or slimy bars.
Fuck OFF already. I’ll get you all, one at a time, if it’s the last thing I do… —Fruit Fly Annihilator
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2010.
And of course the ants too.
I hear ya, our house is trying to save $ on the utilities bill by using the dishwasher maybe once a week; problem is, we’re all too lazy to wash much of anything in the sink. Everytime I open the dishwasher my face meets up with the flycloud from hell. They’re laying their larvae in there. Fucking disgusting.
Earwigs are the worst. I know they don’t actually crawl into your ear and burrow through your brain – but I just cannot get that episode of Night Gallery out of my head. Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk. >: )
Yes, composting has been brilliantly executed in this province.
Have you ever found a carpet of dead flies inches thick?
I have silverfish, and it’s really starting to piss me off. I have pets, so I can only use non-chemical bug killers and they don’t work nearly as well as I wish they would. Bleh.
Gross, gross, gross. To me, it’s the only pitfall of summer. Reaching for my bottle of wine and having fruit flies swarm up is disgusting. Ugh.
Tralala – last night I did the plastic wrap over a bowl of apple cider vinegar trick – there were about a dozen buggers in it this morning. Give that a try.
fruit flies, usually hang around fruit, hmmmm, could be a major breaking fucking news story here. STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES.
wash all your fruit and veggies as soon as you get it home. bananas, citrus, etc are places that fruit flies like to lay their eggs and sometimes you bring them home from the grocery store with you.
ya all want a really creepy feeling for the rest of the day, get one tick on you, makes your skin crawl just thinking about those little bastards.
…with a twist of Lyme?
I once bought some Cod fillets from the little yellow grocery store that used to be on Coburg. They were fresh all right, the worms in the package were still wriggling. Thank you very fucking much Greenpeace; seals may be cute but their parasites , not so much.
Abc123, I hear ya. The silverfish in my apartment haven’t eaten any of my books yet, but damn are they ever icky. I haven’t tried this yet, but I heard that you can trap ’em in a potato half that’s been left near where they come out.
geez, y’all are the macgyver of exterminators.
I took out garbage, did all the dishes, and cleaned my apartment before I left for the weekend in hopes that those little mofo’s wouldn’t appear but when I got home I found a swarm of them. They are disgusting and breed when there’s not even food around. WTF? Out came the bowls of vinegar with plastic wrap last night. Hope that stops them…DEAD.
Do you guys live in apartments? Because I have this issue as well, and I wash all my dishes ASAP and don’t leave anything out. The people below me are all disgusting slobs, so I assume most of the flies chill out there and float up to me!
Make sure you add a little dish doap to the bowls to break the surface tension so the buggers drown. They don’t need much, mel, but it’s possible your gross neighbours are part of the problem.
Here’s how to get rid of both fruit flies and silverfish – and they both actually work.
Take a piece of banana (or any fruit), stick it in a cup, cover the cup opening with plastic wrap, secure it with an elastic and punch a few holes the plastic with a toothpick. The little fuckers will get in but won’t get out – something like the Palace on a Friday night.
As for silverfish – cloves will keep ’em away. They hate the smell for some reason and if you put a whole clove or two in the areas where they scuttle, they’ll disappear in no time.
Pour a little bit of tequila into a clear glass and put a layer of plastic wrap on top. Cut a small slit or poke some fair-sized holes in the plastic and set it where the flies are all over. Worked for my roommates and I years ago.
Pour a generous helping – about 12 ounces – of a good single malt scotch into a clear glass and cover it over with plastic wrap. Poke a small hole in the plastic and insert a straw. Sip the scotch through the straw but not too slowly. This works at getting rid of all kinds of problems of the pest kind.
Mel: Fruit flies are not exclusive to apartments. We somehow have them in my house. Not many thankfully, but they are there.
My room mates and I do the vinegar trick and it works.
i like the farmers idea the most, and earwigs are very icky
Apple cider vineager is like crack for those damn fruit flies. Same trick that TTFN said though plastic over a glass , punch some holes. Watch how fast the glass fills up. Dont know why but they love it. I have a half full glass filling up right now…
Oh and I have actually used my vacuum to suck them up quick fast too, wait for them to bunch up on a plant or something , hit the plant to get them moving and suck away. It works…
The vinegar method works great with fruit flies! I can’t imagine treating the little buggers to ‘ta-kill-ya’ though. That stuff is too precious to waste a drop…pass the salt and lime s.v.p. Marguaritas anyone? (I trust Ivan-the-inebriate-innovator has a ready supply of lozenges lest we run out of ice later on…hehehe!)
>; )
Bahaha… thanks for the chuckle OL, I needed it. (as I get ready for a gruelling 2 hr phone conference…). Yer right – save the tequilla! Kill them with vi-ge-nar!
A bowl of vinegar covered with plastic wrap and some holes poked into it by toothpicks will rid your world of fruit flies. Or do you mean the ones coming to Halifax for Pride? Those I don’t know how to get rid of. Maybe a 50% off sale at Le Chateau?
or a sex and the city movie marathon
zZz… You can’t really have a movie marathon with only 2 movies :p
To solve that “problem” you jus give out free drinks at Ref’s
Who is this years Grand Marshal? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Newton The Centaur – “No Herc, No. It’s not fun anymore and it’s starting to hurt, starting to hurt.”
Actually Mind Snap, you can have a marathon with two films. The directors cuts of the Lord Of The Rings, any two of them can take up about 8 hours.
@Ivan
With you latest comment this bitch has now gone full circle, or at least is staying on topic.
For such a “Will”, you certainly come across as a “Jack”, sebastian.
Whatever our political slant I think we can all agree on one thing. Newton was gayer than a french trombone.
snap, if I were watching…
two of those craptacular horror shows would seem like much more than a marathon…
I’d need a nice bottle of 80 proof or a fork to gouge out my eyes and puncture my eardrums.
or both of course
Spoons work much better for eye extraction.
What about a spork?
I have used the vinegar trick, but it only seems to work for a little bit before they come back. I have seen them come up through the drains on many occasions and I am certain that’s where my problem originates from. Put plugs in the drains and it really helps.
Sex and the City? Ick! That woman makes my skin crawl.
I think it’s one of those things like Americans believing Canadians say Oot and Aboot. Somehow, they all believe it, yet none of us say it.
she is rather horse-faced…
forget the ugly stick, she fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.
and TTFN, I was trying to be practical by using one implement for both causes…
forgetting the perfect tool sebastian mentioned….
then again, he’s used to references like ‘perfect tool’
Peter Griffin got it right. She looks like a foot.
knock on effing WOOD, the fruit flies around here have, for some reason disappeared. I’m not exactly sure what I did, but none are to be seen as of late.
I’ve heard they also congregate around house plants and I have a TON in my bedroom/bathroom and have always had the little fucks around. However, we started putting plastic bags in our compost bin, and tying the bag up in one knot after we put something in there and closing the lid securely and emptying it every night. We have two and rotate and clean the one we just emptied with bleach and let it soak outside on the patio over night.
Or maybe my kitties have been killing the little fucks…they’re great at catching flies so maybe? who knows. I had a silverfish issue in my bathroom, but knock on wood again it has seemed to clear itself up too.
THOUGH, just a thought: we have a new super in the building who has actually been putting the air exchanger on every day, unlike the last super who would NEVER put it on so that could be it…I’ve noticed the air is fresher in the overall building — my end of the floor has a few smokers and we haven’t been able to smell it since the new supers have moved in and turned the exchanger on on a regular basis.