How to Rid Your House of Fruit Flies

Fruit flies may also use your trash can as a breeding ground, especially when there’s rotting food inside, so you may want to take the garbage out more frequently. You’ll also want to flush your garbage disposal: Grind a handful of ice cubes to dislodge any stuck-on foods, then rinse with hot water. Regularly wipe down counters to ensure the flies don’t find any food remnants, and generally keep your kitchen as clean as possible for at least a week to prevent female fruit flies from laying more eggs.

Trap flies with apple cider vinegar

Cleaning your kitchen will stop fruit flies from reproducing, but you’ll probably want to get rid of the bugs buzzing around your home too. (You could just wait for them to die off, but they can live for two weeks or longer in the right conditions.) One of the best ways to do this is with a DIY fruit fly trap that you can make using pantry staples.

Pour apple cider vinegar (ACV) into a small bowl, then mix in a few drops of dish soap. Apple cider vinegar works better than white vinegar for fruit flies because it smells like fermenting fruit. Red wine vinegar will also work, but it tends to be more expensive than ACV. Microwave the mixture for 20 seconds or so to enhance the smell of the vinegar, then place the bowl in an area with a lot of flies. The scent will draw the bugs in, and because the dish soap reduces the surface tension of the liquid, they’ll get stuck and drown. You’ll start to see results in just a few hours. Dump and refresh the solution when it starts to get saturated with dead flies.

Capture them in a bottle

Another popular DIY option is trapping the flies in a bottle—a beer, fruit juice, or wine bottle with just the dregs left works perfectly. Put plastic wrap over the bottle’s opening, secure it in place with a rubber band, then poke a few small holes in the top. Once the flies climb in, lured to the sweet scent of fermenting grapes, they’ll be stuck and eventually die.

Buy a premade fruit fly trap

If you don’t want to use a vinegar trap or other DIY solution, there are fruit fly traps you can buy online or from home improvement stores. For instance, the TERRO Fruit Fly Trap comes with a liquid that you pour into the apple-shaped trap, and as the scent lures in the bugs, they then drown. Flypunch is a similar option—it comes in a container that resembles a spice jar, and you simply flip the lid open and place it near the bugs.

How do you get rid of fruit flies in 5 minutes?

It would be nice if you could banish fruit flies in just a few minutes, but unfortunately, it will take longer than that to eliminate an infestation. You can kill the flies you can see the analog way, using a fly swatter with a fine-mesh surface—or by spraying them with isopropyl alcohol. However, as a long-term solution, you’ll also want to clean your kitchen and remove any overripe fruit or vegetables where the bugs could lay eggs.

How do you get rid of fruit flies overnight?

To capture fruit flies at night, you may want to invest in an insect trap like Katchy. This device has a light that will draw flies toward it in the dark. The bugs are then sucked into the trap by the unit’s fan and get stuck to the sticky paper at the bottom of the trap. In the morning, you can simply throw away the paper and replace it with a fresh one. Note that this won’t miraculously solve the problem in a single evening—as noted above, you’ll still likely want to clean your kitchen—but in a multipronged approach, this can be a useful tool in getting rid of fruit flies once and for all.