The Dish of Death
Posted by Danielle Bean in Homemaking on Monday, August 10, 2009 2:54 PM
Rachel’s recent post about ridding your house of fruit flies came to mind recently.
What made me think of it?
Oh, I don’t know ... perhaps it was the clusters of bitty bugs that seemed to cover every surface of my kitchen and the swarms that swirled around my head as I tried to wash dishes or prepare dinner or (forget about it) eat a meal.
When we got desperate enough, we tried Rachel’s jar technique one evening. Dan even manufactured a paper cone to help the little buggers along their way into the jar.
We used a mushy tomato and a spoonful of salsa as bait (they love that salsa) and it worked fabulously. The next morning, Dan dumped the jar’s contents and I thought we were good.
We must have had an extra-gross infestation, though, because the bugs came back. In droves.
In my disgust and desperation, I did some quick online research and discovered an even crueler way to really trap and kill the bugs.
Fill a small dish with sweet wine (I used Marsala—very popular with the insect set) and add a few drops of dish soap. Stir it up and leave it where the bugs tend to gather. The wine (or you can use cider vinegar) attracts the fruit flies and the soap changes the liquid’s surface tension so that instead of skimming and sipping as they like to do, the flies slip in and drown.
Very gross. Very effective.
If you have a super-charged fruit fly infestation, I really recommend this method.
This morning, one of the older boys watched me as I dumped the contents of last night’s fly “festivities.”
“I hope it was worth it,” he told the sorry bugs.
I think the average fruit fly has a life span of about 24 hours. I like to think I showed them a good time.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
