Fruit flies can be the bane of any kitchen. Once they get in, they’re in your food bin, gripping on tight to your fruit and lurking around your fresh plants. But where on Earth do they come from and how do they hunt down your food so fast?
Drosophila Melanogaster (better known as fruit flies) love a kitchen. That’s because they house absolutely everything that they need to survive. They are able to detect ripening fruit, latching onto chemicals that get released into the air.
As fruit begins to ferment, yeast produces compounds that fruit flies detect with specialised receptors. These chemical signals help the flies locate food from a distance, even when fruit may look perfectly healthy to us.
But, despite the name, it isn’t just fruit that they are attracted to. Fruit flies are looking for vegetable scraps and overripe produce, sticky spills and food residue found in bins or scraps in your sink.
That is why you find them lurking around food waste bins and sink drains. Once they find a good source of food, they lay their eggs there. They are looking particularly for moist locations with plenty of matter.
Now, here comes the problem. Fruit flies reproduce very quickly. Under warm conditions, some fruit flies can develop from egg to adult in around 8-10 days. This can turn from one or two flies to a small army pretty quickly.
Where are they coming from?
Fruit flies appear in a couple of key ways. Most notably, they can simply smell food and enter through doors and windows. It only takes one or two to breed in your kitchen and create more.
Alternatively, they can arrive on fruit or vegetables, either bought from a shop or garden. Because they are so tiny, it can be hard to spot them or their eggs.
Once they come in, they choose a good breeding ground and commit to that spot.
How to stop them appearing?
Other than being somewhat annoying, fruit flies can actually cause several problems. Not only can they contaminate food that they nest in, but they can also simply spoil produce, damaging soft fruit such as raspberries, strawberries or cherries.
They aren’t actually dangerous and are mostly a pest around your bins and food. However, there are a few key steps to take to reduce their numbers.
Giving your fruit and veg a clean when you bring it in from the garden or shop can reduce existing eggs. Equally, regularly taking out your food waste and cleaning up any sticky stains as soon as they occur can reduce their breeding grounds.
For any ripe fruit, try to keep it in the fridge where appropriate and remove overripe produce as soon as it passes being edible.
If you find that they keep coming back, it can be worth doing a kitchen reset, deep cleaning all of your surfaces and throwing out any gone-off food.
