Eliminating Fruit Flies Near Indoor Composters - Uncle Jim's Worm Farm

Eliminating Fruit Flies Near Indoor Composters

Compost, Indoor Composters, Live Worms, Red Worms

3fruit-fly-vacuumIf your household composts its kitchen scraps, you may have had problems with fruit flies. These tiny flies are harmless, but they are definitely annoying. And they can invade your bowl of fresh fruit, spoiling expensive produce. Whether you keep a compost pail on your countertop or use worms to break down scraps in an indoor compost bin (vermicomposting), you need to give fruit flies the boot!

Trap Them

If you start fooling around with your kitchen scraps, you will disturb the fruit flies and they will disperse. The first thing you need to do is start trapping them.

The quickest way to do this is simply to vacuum the fruit flies up. Station a vacuum cleaner where the flies are congregating. Switch on the vacuum cleaner and wave the hose in their general direction. Be careful not to vacuum up worms, worm bedding, scraps or water. When the flies come within a few inches of the business end of a vacuum hose, they will get sucked in. This seems to kill them – we have examined a bagless vacuum cleaner, and all the flies were dead. Repeat the vacuum treatment several times a day until the population has dwindled.

Meanwhile, set up a trap to catch the faster ones that outsmart your vacuum. You can buy them at the store or online. Or make your own fruit fly trap (see photo above):

Pour an inch of apple cider vinegar into the bottom of a jar. Add one drop dishwashing liquid. Place a funnel into the jar or make one using a sheet of paper. Tape the funnel in place. Fruit flies will check in, but they won’t check out. They have difficulty flying straight up. Soon enough, they will fall into the vinegar. The soap breaks the surface tension, and they will drown. Leave this near the source of the flies until the problem goes away (at least 2 weeks). You can replace the liquid if it gets dirty. Tip: don’t place it directly in the worm bin. This actually works – see photos at the bottom of this article.

Take Away Their Food

Now that the vacuum and traps are in place, get to the root of the problem by taking away their food. Fruit flies are attracted to a yeast that results from the initial decomposition of plant material. They eat fruits and vegetables and lay their eggs in them.

If you have any fresh or scrap produce on countertops, simply cover them or put them in the refrigerator. Make sure any fruit flies are brushed away or vacuumed first. In the refrigerator, you might need to store them in air-tight containers if they are already contaminated. Kitchen scraps for composting can be frozen.

In your indoor vermicomposting bin:

  • Remove any large scraps that are tough to break down.
  • If you see any very tiny white maggots or little dark pupae, chuck them outside.
  • Make sure all scraps are buried. Leave nothing on the top.
  • Sprinkle up to 1” of fresh bedding on the top. You can make it from, for example, coconut coir, pure peat moss and shredded paper mixed with water. This bedding should be a bit drier than a wrung-out sponge – too moist and it will smother your worms. Rub it between your fingers and thumb when adding, to introduce air for your worms. This extra bedding will make it really difficult for the fruit flies to find the scraps.
  • Quit adding organic matter to the bin for a while. Give the worms a chance to gobble up all the scraps. This cuts back on the amount of organic matter in the bin.
  • When you add scraps, make sure they are easy to break down. Bury them and cover with at least 1” of bedding.

Keep Going

Fruit fly eggs take around 2 weeks to develop into adult fruit flies. You need to break the breeding cycle by following this program for at least 2 weeks. As soon as you see flies, repeat the vacuuming. Make sure the fruit fly traps are in place. Keep produce off the countertops and bury the kitchen scraps in the worm bin.

Harmless but irritating, fruit flies can’t stop you from having a composting program. With very little effort, drosophila melanogaster can be eliminated from your home.

If you need composting worms, Uncle Jim recommends his Red Composting Worm Mix. Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm also carries a selection of indoor composting bins.

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16 thoughts on “Eliminating Fruit Flies Near Indoor Composters

  1. I’ve heard apple cider vinegar is a great way to get rid of fruit flies. I’ll definitely have to keep these tips in mind for my compost bin. Thanks for sharing the tips.

  2. I’ve found that leaving an unfinished bottle of wine on the counter attracts these little bothersome bugs too!

  3. The only thing that works better than cider vinegar is kombucha. Even better, put a piece of dried fruit in the liquid and I usually rid my kitchen in one day. Make sure the trap is the only source of food accessible to them, so do your dishes and scrub your sinks and counters.

  4. Weeks and weeks of fruit flies, attracted to my Stainless steel compost pot when I open it. Today there were hundreds of but look like white eggs attached around the top of the pot above the composting matter. I’ll try your suggestions. Another website said that the mother Apple cider vinegar doesn’t work it Hass to be the cheap kind. Do you agree? And also it’s going to be 15° tonight, Then several nights of mid-twenties here in C. Oregon. I put a quart pot outside. I wonder if the cold temperatures will kill the flies that I haven’t caught that went out with the pot and kill the eggs. ??

  5. Fruit flies on composting toilets can get horrendous. I vacuumed up hundreds of them. Then I regularly brought toilet outdoors for a thorough cleaning. I found when I turned the toilet upside down, there were eggs in an otherwise hidden spot. So using many gallons of water to clean every time I emptied sorta diminished the environmental claims. Solution for me was move to place with septic system.

  6. I introduced beneficial nematodes to my worm bins and have not had fruit flies since. I bought them at a local independent nursery, but there are many online sources as well. My family produces a lot of organic waste that goes into the worm bins every week, and no other method of fruit fly control has been successful for us. After about a week from introduction of the nematodes we were fruit fly free, and they haven’t returned in over a year.

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