“You have a remarkable flair for the obvious.” Sometimes I don’t. And sometimes the Internet doesn’t either. And this leads to my fruit fly story.
Recently, I heard I wasn’t the only one for whom clusters of flies mysteriously appeared despite my not having any food around. I went online and discovered all sorts of DIY fly strips by boiling up sugars, dipping paper… overall quite a production that made me wonder if you could use the same strips for DIY leg waxing. But I decided to go old school and bought some of those tubes that the sticky strips pull from.
A week later, the strip had netted 4 flies.
In the meantime I was using the thousand year old DIY method: the hand clap.
Then one day while sick I left out a glass of grapefruit juice. It was like flies to honey. Or fruit flies to fruit. In the coming days I left the glass out. It had a 5:1 success ratio over the fly strip.
A friend who came over for dinner remarked, “Well, they ARE fruit flies after all.” Duh!
The lesson: Stop and think about the easy and obvious solutions before assuming I don’t have the knowledge within, to connect the dots. (This is a frequent Achilles heel when it comes to home repairs and maintenance… the fear that I know nothing makes me believe I know nothing, until now!)
Secondly, you get more fruit flies with fruit juice than vinegar (or fly strips).
