We already know that the female brain magnifies spiders at least 25 times their actual size, so if any of those eight-legged creepers had attacked my kitchen, I probably wouldn’t be here to warn you about the fruit flies. But we got lucky.
Until now, my fruit fly battles have been pretty one-sided. If a fly or three hitched a ride in on a banana, I’d just escort the fruit outside and the wildlife usually went with it. Game over. I could win with my opposable thumbs tied behind my back.
But those were yesterday’s fruit flies. The ones that landed in my kitchen via cantaloupe last week are impervious to bug swatters, bleach and tiki torches. (I smashed, sprayed and brandished all of the above.) These new flies reproduce at the speed of light and travel in swarms reminiscent of locust plagues.
Minutes after the melon arrived, you couldn’t see the fridge through the flies. Gazillions of hovering dots obscured the windows and counters. I always knew that buying a house with a kitchen would come back to haunt me.
Outnumbered, I ran to Google for advice. The first site said fruit flies love wine. Good! They came to the right place. I poured the little beasts some Pinot Grigio and Cabernet, not knowing if they preferred white or red. Then I went back to Google to find out why I did that.
If I’d read past the second sentence, I’d have known that the flies want rotting fruit served with their wine. And they need paper-towel funnels to lead them to it. I ran back to the kitchen to construct my traps and chop up the guilty melon. But nothing seemed to affect the flies.
I tried every remedy the Internet had to offer. I opened the kitchen windows, cranked up the oven exhaust fan and filled every bowl I owned with raw, unfiltered vinegar and a drop of dish soap. That’s supposed to make the flies sink. Otherwise, they just surf around and laugh at you.
The next morning, it seemed like the fruit-fly population had doubled. Not surprising, considering all the wine they drank.
A friend who’d grown tired of me moaning about the bug invasion showed up with some flypaper—those ugly, twirly things you unwind and hang up like sticky stalactites. Some idiot could easily get stuck to it right along with the bugs.
“It looks like you’re performing some sort of exorcism,” she said, surveying the bowls of vinegar and wine, funnels and dead fruit adorning the kitchen. “Did you try vacuuming them up?”
“Of course, but they just teleport out of the way,” I said. “All I got was my curtains.”
Insects are tough. When my neighbor found an ant colony in her microwave, she nuked them. But she swears the ants just walked out after two minutes like they enjoyed the sauna.
After a weeklong battle, the fruit flies’ superior air power proved too much for my crude weaponry, so I reluctantly summoned a professional exterminator. He’s not cheap, but he’ll get the flypaper out of my hair at no extra charge.
Jan A. Igoe would much rather lose to a respectable bug—say, a Hercules beetle that can lift 850 times its weight —instead of a wimpy fly you can’t see without bifocals. Share your adventures in exterminating here.