Found this on a wikihow page on getting rid of fruit flies:
Make an oven trap:
1. Remove all available food from kitchen. Clean the dishes, place open items in ziplock bags or the fridge.
2. Open the door of your oven and place a piece of fruit (banana or kiwi peels) in there overnight.
3. Wake up early the next morning and quietly close the oven door.
4. Turn on the oven to 400ºF/200ºC for about 10-15 minutes and majority of your fruit flies will be gone.
5.Clean the oven thoroughly.
I love the third instruction here. It implies so much. Fruit flies, apparently, have reliable internal alarm clocks so it is imperitive to wake early to catch them in the act. Also, they have sensitive ears, much like those camp counselors that sleep by the door to catch their charges sneaking out to the other side of lake. QUIETLY shut that oven door. Shhhhh.
And MEEZUS GEEZUS, what about the minority of fruit flies that were not awoken by you ever-so-quietly closing the oven door and get the pleasure of watching their little friends burn to a crisp right before their tiny, tiny eyes? Yaaaaay survival of the fittest.
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Or, you could cut the top off a plastic pop bottle, put some sweet liquid in it (about 1 inch) invert the cut off portion funnel-like into the base and tape the seam nice & tight.
Apparently fruit flies will go in but not be able to find the way out. We used a couple of these (plus kept kitchen clean of fruit) and they were gone fairly soon. And I didn't have to buy a ton of ziploc bags.
I'm reading the new David Sedaris book and there is an entire chapter devoted to his obsession with the spiders living in the windows of his home in France.
He was going out of his way to feed them, not kill them. T'was funny.
My friend JennyB cohabitates with fruit flies in her home. She eats massive amounts of fruit and has basically given up trying to fight them. They die so quickly once the fruit is gone anyways.
Appearently the fruit flies are not too picky about the oven temp since the 400F/200C figures are not equivalent. At 375 F, we would have the interesting possibility of simultaneously baking a fruit cake AND killing fruit flies.
The yellow jackets are showing up in Fargo, so will need to bait our new traps which screw onto a standard pop bottle and eliminate the need to clean out the conventional traps: Just unscrew the pop bottle and toss it.
Finally, back in my grad school days, my roommate and I encouraged wild spiders in the kitchen. We gave them names, fed them flies, and hoped they would be eating less desirable creepy-crawleys that lived in our apartment. My wife and daughters don't share this view of indoor fauna, so I am now called upon to commit arachnicide.
wikiHow: The domain of armchair quarterbacks.
Everything I've read there reads like it's been written by a 7th grader who only has the vaguest of ideas about what is wanted, as well as how to give useful instructions.
BUT, this post does remind me of one of my favorite Deep Thoughts from Jack Handy: "You know what would be good for keeping mosquitos away when you are trying to enjoy a nice summer evening on your front porch? A big bag of blood."
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