Since 2018, the pest control industry has been enjoying an impressive growth rate of about 7% each year on average. In the United States, people invest over $26 billion each year in pest control services. There are now more than 34,000 pest control businesses operating around the country.
If you have a horrible fruit fly infestation, you might want to call pest control services to help you with it. However, most people can take care of fruit flies on their own without professional help.
Being able to do so requires knowing about effective fruit fly infestation management techniques. Depending on your situation, you might need to use more than one of the strategies we will discuss in this article. So what can you try to get rid of the fruit flies bothering you at home?
Read on to learn all about the most effective ways to deal with a fruit fly infestation!
Clean to Avoid Fruit Flies in the Home
If you want to prevent fruit flies, keeping your kitchen and home as clean as possible is the most effective way to do so. Even if you already have fruit flies, focusing on extra cleanliness for a while can go a long way toward getting rid of them.
Fruit flies depend on the food that you leave out to support themselves and reproduce. If you keep your kitchen as clean as possible, your fruit fly infestation made dwindle away to nothing all on its own.
Fruit flies only live for a few days. If you can starve them out, your infestation might be over in less than a week.
Throw Away Old Produce
However, you might need to do more than make sure that all of your surfaces are clean. If you have old produce around, that may be more than enough to support a fruit fly infestation for the foreseeable future. This applies especially to any fruits or vegetables that are rotting or have become soft and overripe.
However, in some cases, having any produce out at all will provide fruit flies with what they need to reproduce. You may need to temporarily store all of your produce in the fridge or in tight containers where flies will not be able to access it.
Take Out the Garbage as Soon as Possible
In many cases, fruit flies live off of the food in your garbage. If you are dealing with an infestation, you might want to focus on taking out the garbage much sooner than usual.
Your garbage can does not need to be overflowing in order to provide fruit flies with the food they need. In fact, before you throw away something like a piece of produce, you might consider taking it straight out to your outdoor garbage can. That way, fruit flies will not have the opportunity to use it to continue their infestation.
Cleaning Drains Helps With Fly Removal
Even your drain can hold enough food particles to sustain a fruit fly infestation. As long as your infestation remains, make a point of checking your sink drains once or even twice a day.
If they have any food in them, clean them out. You might also want to remind everyone in the home to rinse the drain anytime they wash food down it.
Make a Fruit Fly Killer Trap
Preventing fruit flies from reproducing can be an effective way to starve out an infestation. However, you can sometimes achieve faster results by killing the fruit flies you already have. Although there are some powerful tools that can help you do this, you can also create your own trap at home using common kitchen ingredients.
All you need to do is put some apple cider vinegar inside a bowl or glass. Then, cover it up with plastic wrap and make sure that it stays in place with some tape or a rubber band. With that done, poke holes in the top of the plastic wrap that are barely large enough for fruit flies to crawl through.
Fruit flies are attracted to apple cider vinegar so they will land on this trap and then crawl inside. Once they are inside, they will not be able to find their way back out again. If you have never used this kind of trap before, you will be amazed at how many fruit flies it can catch in a single day.
In some cases, you can even create a simpler trap with an exposed bowl of vinegar and a single drop of dish soap mixed into it. The dish soap will eliminate the surface tension of the vinegar. When fruit flies land on it, they will get stuck.
Invest in Pest Control Services
For a serious fruit fly infestation, you might want to resort to calling for professional help. If these tips are not enough to get rid of your infestation, you might need the powerful tools and expertise that pest control services can provide.
Try a Bug Zapping Tool
A bug zapping trap can be another powerful way to get rid of a fruit fly infestation as fast as possible. Check out https://bijlimart.com/how-to-attract-flies-to-a-bug-zapper/ to learn more about how you can attract as many fruit flies as possible to a bug zapper that will kill them instantly.
Know How to Manage a Fruit Fly Infestation
If you have never dealt with a fruit fly infestation before, it can feel impossible to resolve. However, people have spent a long time figuring out how to get rid of fruit flies in the easiest way possible. The tips in this article will help you get rid of your fruit flies and prevent more from coming back in the future.
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