Fly infestation

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

I came home from a 12-hour day at work to find that the 4 or 5 flies that were in my house when I left this morning had multiplied and freaking taken over. There are easily 50 flies in my kitchen and dining room; possibly more like 100. Not fruit flies, flies.

So I turn to the wisdom of you, internet. Has this happened to you? What did you do? Is there any way to figure out where the hell they all came from? My roommate and I are very clean, I swear -- we take the garbage out, we keep all our food wrapped, the compost lives outside...

I bought hanging sticky traps, but I don't think they're going to cut it. UV traps are $50 a pop, so I want to know they're going to be awesome before I spend the money. (Or maybe you have one I could borrow?) I don't want to spray insecticide in my kitchen if there's any other way. Is there any non-toxic spray I could use?

Please, please help. I'm so grossed out right now I can't even tell you.

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

This happened to us earlier this week. We made a fly trap out of a jar of jam, whihc was diltuted with water, and then had fly sized holes poked in the lid. It took a couple days, but they are gone now.

I have no idea where they came from or what they wanted, but they were fucking annoying and rather disgusting.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

That doesn't just give them a new place to breed? It's more or less what I do with fruit flies, but I'm scared that I'd just end up with a whole new generation of these bastards.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

No, it drowned them. That's why you have to dilute it.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

butterfly net and HUNT :)

or electric "tennis raquet" - cook them - more active hunting.

so, what are they living off of. maggots need food. they are coming from somewhere. find and fix!

and yah, i'd setup sticky traps too. that way you know later you aren't getting another generation.

but first, find out what they are eating and breeding on.

#

[blondeamazon.livejournal.com]

We had it happen and I know a couple other people did too. I checked all the windows and ended up closing most of them, trapping the flies between the inner window and screen. They were all dead the next day. Then I just tracked the rest with the trusty fly swatter and had kill count over 20, with my roomie adding close to 10 more. I think it is just the season.

[whaler.livejournal.com]

sometimes when you have that many it makes a difference to just open all the windows and try to make them all fly out.

[theodosia.livejournal.com]

That's the method we used in my old apartment on Spring Hill -- once a year fly infestation in an immaculate apartment, I swear! Since they were attracted to the light in the windows, we just opened up the ones they hung around in and ended up with more things flying OUT than IN.

[countlibras.livejournal.com]

in my case, they were coming from the attic and somehow finding their way into the house. a fogger in the attic was the only thing that worked, which probably isn't what you want to resort to.

oh! you can put up plastic sheeting in between rooms to try to figure out where they are coming from. that might help some.

[ilai]

Ick, I'm sorry you have to deal with that.

When I was in college someone left a bag of rotting apples in the basement and we had a similarly big infestation of random flies (I don't remember what kind but they were much bigger than fruit flies). Since we had fluorescent lights running along the ceiling, what we ended up doing was suspending the sticky traps more or less parallel to the lights, so any flies attracted to the lights would fly right into the traps. That seemed to snag the vast majority of them.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

Other people's advice for how to kill the flies seems pretty sound, so I am going to jump in and suggest that you need to find the source of them as well. In all likelihood if you come home and suddenly find that many of them in your house, they are breeding somewhere in there. Once upon a time when this happened to me, it turned out that there was a long forgotten about potato at the bottom of the potato bin which had become a thriving maggot tenement. I literally went from having no flies at all to having dozens of them in the course of about two days. Big, house flies, that is.

Chances are you have at least one very rotten piece of fruit in your house and you're going to want to find and dispose of it before you get to the business of trying to kill the flies.

[tfarrell.livejournal.com]

I second m00n's comments: you need to track down the cause of the problem, that is the most important thing for you to do or no amount of effort will get rid of the flies. Flies don't just invade en masse and multiply excessively without cause. Go over your home very carefully. You'll probably find something somewhere which has gone bad. Also take out all trash while you're at it, sometimes it's something in a trash bag, even if it hasn't been there long enough to seem like a problem. Flies invading doesn't mean you're unclean. It just means some, possibly quite small and innocuous, thing has escaped your attention. It happens to everyone eventually, don't let it upset you overmuch.

One thing I found very helpful when this happened to me last year is a fly trap that I bought at Tags in porter square. It's a jar about 5-ish inches tall, with a lid that has four or so holes in it, and it comes with a small packet of "bait". You put the bait in the jar, add some water, and wait. It emits a horrific stench, which fortunately doesn't carry far to the human nose. I put the thing OUTSIDE my home, on the (not enclosed) back porch. All the flies that had found their way INTO my home by some mysterious entry to get at a bit of pork which had gone bad in my kitchen trash can, suddenly decided it would be a great idea to find their way OUT of my home by some mysterious means so they could go joyfully drown themselves in the trap. Overnight they'd almost all gone away, I killed the few stragglers, and that was the end of it. It was very effective and inexpensive.

And finally, UV traps can be purchased fairly inexpensively from amazon.com , but they're better for mosquitos.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

The fly trap sounds handy -- I'll go pick one up today. Thanks!

And we have gone over and over our house. There aren't many places for stuff to hide, and really, truly, there isn't anything rotting or making a happy fly home in any way. I wish I *had* found something; then I could get rid of it and know that the problem was on its way to being over! So frustrating.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

If you have a cat, you might have a larger problem. I Had a housemate once with a cat with an eventually fatal kidney infection, that had picked an out of the way spot on the living room rug. For some reason, the urine smell wasn't at all present. But the maggots were thriving happily in the rug's padding. ewwww. Discovered because I felt an especially squishy "soft spot" in the rug where we thought the floor was rotting.

[blondeamazon.livejournal.com]

Ewww! *shudder* Most bugs don't bother me but maggots give me the heebee jeebees!

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

That's horrifying. Yet, I'd rather deal with a maggot colony than with the urine stench I'm still battling from when Rowley was dying.

[blondeamazon.livejournal.com]

I didn't find a rotting source so the only thing I can think of is that the bathroom window was open an inch or so at the top where there was no screen. I shut that first and have only had one or two, which I consider a normal amount to sneak in the door, since. The peach tray sounds like a good culprit. Good luck!

[jaybird1981.livejournal.com]

Have you brought any cardboard boxes in recently? Specifically, boxes from a grocery store? These can carry in fly larvae, what with having food in them and all. I had a similar fly infestation a few years ago right before my roommate moved, and the flies were gone once the boxes were. A few days of hanging up flypaper did the trick.

I sincerely hope you're able to find the cause and get rid of the flies, for they are a whole load of creepy and ick.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

I like this theory, since we've looked everywhere and there's no tasty rotting fly food anywhere in our house. My roommate's mom went peach picking and brought her some peaches about a week ago in a cardboard tray. The peaches have all been dealt with, but the tray was still around... that's our best working theory at this point, even though the tray didn't have maggots on it or anything obvious that we could see. (We threw it out anyway, of course.)

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

Dead mouse under the fridge?

91% isopropyl alcohol (from CVS) in a spray bottle will take them out individually. I keep a spray bottle of it handy anyway for cleaning the stove hood & spills without leaving residue, or just to squirt the back of my neck on hot days.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

Good call on the alcohol! My roomie and I have been happily blasting the last stragglers.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

Those electronic tennis racquet "swatters" work great, butyou have to discard the twitching electrocuted bodies somewhere, because flies are large enough to not die, just to become comatose for about 5-10 minutes. Flush or toss out a window.

If you only have a whacker, shut out all houselights, close all windowshades and sit in a dark room and turn on the TV, and lurk. They will land on the TV and them SMACK! they'll be dead. Of course, you'll have to clean up the screen afterwards.

[motive-nuance.livejournal.com]

What m00n (and others) said. The flies that are alive are gross and should be killed, but in the long term, you will never be rid of kitchen pests if they can find food. Nutrient deprivation is key.

[jenskot.livejournal.com]

AAUGHHH, me too! My house has been taken over by dozens of flies since yesterday! One snuck in and definitely found a breeding spot, since I took out the bathroom garbage (no food at all) and thought I saw a maggot. I convinced myself it wasn't true, because I am fucking TERRIFIED of maggots so if it were true I would have had to run screaming and vomit and faint... but I guess it was true. I have been hitting them with hairspray and then throwing them out in tissue, but I'm going to get closed-lid trash baskets and flypaper and hope they go away. ::cries::

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry! I bought some pretty effective flycatchers from Home Depot. They're 3-D rectangles coated with the same sticky stuff that's on flypaper and come two to a box for about $5. We hung one from the dining room light, one from the kitchen light, and (the most effective) one under the stove light, which we've left on all weekend. It keeps drawing the flies to its lovely warm light and they keep getting stuck. (It's amazing how fast we've gotten used to cooking under a pile of dead flies.)

Anyway, we put them up Friday night when Fly '09 began, and at this point they're almost all stuck and dead. There are still 4 or 5 zooming around the house, but they'll die of their own accord in a few days. Zapping them with isopropyl alcohol is also an option, as redcolumbine suggested -- it works pretty well.

Good luck! It will be okay. (Also, if you've looked everywhere and can't figure out where the breeding ground is, don't feel too bad. I couldn't either. I'm hoping it was a one-time thing and we won't have another round next week. *crosses fingers*)

[jenskot.livejournal.com]

After getting attacked in bed last night (ok, using my notebook in the dark), I wigged out and ran to Shaws and dropped $40 on cloves and stockings to make clove sachets at midnight, which apparently they dislike. I also sprinkled ground cloves all around my bed... which probably would have worked against vampires, but flies, uh, fly. This morning I bought some flypaper and those rectangles, which I enclosed in a box full of holes because I didn't want to see dead flies everywhere, and hung it from the chinese lantern overhead in the LR where they've basically encamped (hope they find their way in). Over the course of the day I saw several dozen on the windows, so I sprayed them with orange cleaner (I hear ammonia attracts flies) and then hand-killed them. I haven't seen any for a few hours, but I'm afraid... I haven't looked everywhere, but we don't have garbage around. Although there are lots of papers strewn about, and those fuckers could set up a nursery *anywhere*... hopefully the clove smell will deter the next generation from emerging. :(

[versonic.livejournal.com]

This happened once when I was a kid - there was a dead squirrel in our attic, which was far enough removed from the rest of the living area that we didn't smell it. So, it's possible that something died somewhere that you just can't locate. Depressing and gross but true.

Um but I have no good advice aside from sticky traps, fly swatters, and patience.

[jenskot.livejournal.com]

Do you even know where to buy the UV fly traps? I have been looking all over Camberville and Watertown, and no one has them! And I AM willing to spend $50 a pop at this point... :(