Fruit flies! Help!

[IlanaK]

We seem to have rather a lot of them in our kitchen at the moment. I can only imagine they came in on one of our organic box deliveries. How on earth do we get rid of them???????

you need one of these

Ha ha! Very funny! But seriously, what do I do???

no idea sorry! fly paper?

turn off the light in the room where they are and then turn on the light in a second room which opens to the o/s and is lit brightly. Once they have migrated to the second room, turn off that light and open the door/window to be attracted to the light on the o/s.

Alternatively, leave them alone. they are totally harmless beasties and die off in a couple days.

but hide the bananas. they love bananas and they multiply well, like fruitflies given half the chance.

oooohhhh boy!!! we had them in our pub for years!!! The problem started when we got pumpkins in for Halloween one year, then left them too long and we finished up with fruit flies. We used every commercial insecticide under the sun several times a day, sticky papers, industrial pest control experts - you name it - NOTHING worked. they were living on the beer residues (yeast) that gathers around the pipes in the bar in totally inaccessible recesses so no amount of cleaning or spraying worked.
We did a major bar refurbishment last year and the pest control team came in a couple of times to spray whilst it was all a building site and lo and behold when we reopened the fruit flies had gone. PHEW!!
This isn't encouraging news for you, is it?? Sorry!

Get one of these and have some fun while you get rid of them

I want to know where they come from in general. I occasionally breed elderly bananas on my kitchen counter (in theory will make cake with them, in fact chuck them eventually when they start leaking) and fruit flies just appear on them - how? where from? are they like those things in the desert that lurk for years and years waiting for a rainy season?

Double check there's no fruit or veg stashed away that's rotting. We had a swarm of them only to find that they were being attracted by some forgotten fruit that was going off in a bag from a trip to hospital!

If you leave your door open and some rotting fruit/veg outside they will go out to it.

Hoovering them would probably be the easiest way to catch them, eventually they'll all be gone and if there's no rotting fruit/veg then they shouldn't be attracted again, not in such large numbers anyway.
Venus fly traps like them too!

Thanks everyone. We don't actually have a swarm of them, but we are managing to kill about 5 a day and still see a few flying around. I had a good clean this morning in the kitchen and there is no rotton fruit so hopefully they will all go now.