Anyone who’s ever had a fruit fly problem knows they seem to come out of nowhere and then suddenly there are a multitude of them. How on earth does this happen so fast? Fruit flies can live up to 40-50 days and a female can lay up to 500 eggs in her lifetime. To add to the exponential growth rate, eggs only take about 10 days to mature to full mating capacity and the cycle expands instantly like a dreaded pyramid scheme!

This is why it’s so important to get these little buggers (pun intended) under control at the first signs of them.

Here is our twist on a standard fruit fly remedy that we believe works significantly better than the other ideas online. (See the side by side test info below.)

Good luck!

Ingredients

  • Apple cider vinegar
  • soy sauce
  • dish detergent
  • short glass container

Instructions

  • Poor an inch or more of apple cider vinegar in the bottom of a small glass container or low jar.
  • Add a splash of soy sauce (very little–I added WAY to much in the video–less is more!).
  • Add a squirt of dish detergent and swirl gently to disperse.

*You don’t need saran wrap! That is what the dish soap is for. It breaks the surface tension of the liquid when they land on it and they sink to the bottom. Less plastic waste and less of a pain in the butt.

Put these little containers anywhere that fruit flies are gathering. (And of course, throw away the compost or fruit that is past it’s prime. There has to be something that brought them in.)

Leave for several days. You don’t even have to change out the liquid. Just let them keep dying. Make fresh if it seems to stop working, but usually your fruit flies will be gone by then.

*IMPORTANT: Remember to leave your fruit fly remedy out even after you no longer see them in numbers. Do you remember what I said about gestation? It takes 8 days before eggs hatch and transform into adult flies. So there is a small hidden window of time where you won’t see them, but they might be growing and ready to pop-out at any time.

You don’t want those stragglers to get their two extra days to lay their own eggs or the cycle starts over. So keep those containers out for at least 2 weeks after they are gone to catch any new adults immediately before they can reproduce.

Our remedy versus others – Side by Side Tests

Because we were desperate for a quick fix, we wanted to try everything possible to see what worked best. So we put out different containers with different amounts of water, vinegar, detergent/no detergent, saran/no saran, etc.

But we noticed the flies walking around on the top of the saran and even going inside, but not getting into the liquid and then leaving. (It was weird, like they knew it was a trap. 😂) So we decided to try our intuition and put our own spin on the recipe by adding several drops of soy sauce.

Bwam!

The amount of flies that landed in the open concoction with soy sauce versus the others was remarkable. Probably 6x more! And because there was no plastic wrap, it was easy for them to get into the liquid too.

And no, just soy sauce didn’t work either.

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