Fruit Fly Control for Kitchens and Restaurants

Fruit Fly Control

Where are the fruit flies coming from? Something in the room is fermenting. That is the whole answer, and finding it is most of the job. Fruit flies are about an eighth of an inch long, tan to brown, and the common species has red eyes. They hover over fruit bowls, drains, trash cans and recycling bins in a slow, drifting flight.

They lay eggs on the surface of fermenting material. Overripe fruit, a potato going soft at the back of a cabinet, spilled juice under a refrigerator, beer or wine in a recycling bin, the sludge in a garbage disposal, a damp mop head, a soda syrup line, or a wet rag left in a bucket will all support them. A female lays hundreds of eggs, and in warm weather the cycle from egg to adult takes about a week. That is why a few flies on Monday can be a cloud by Friday.

We begin with an inspection, and with fruit flies that means looking in places people do not usually check. Under and behind appliances, inside the disposal, in floor drains, in the bottom of trash and recycling containers, in produce storage and under bar mats. We are looking for the wet, sweet, fermenting material rather than the flies.

Once we have found it, the treatment is mostly removal. The source is cleaned out or thrown away, the drains and surfaces it soaked into are treated, and the adults present are treated so they do not lay a new batch somewhere else. Then we go through sanitation with you. Produce in the refrigerator, recycling rinsed and taken out, the disposal run and cleaned, mop heads dried. Those steps are what keep the population from rebuilding.

Fruit flies are rarely a single treatment for a bar or restaurant, because the material they need is part of the business. Beer lines, drip trays, bottle returns and produce prep all feed them. For those buildings we set a recurring inspection schedule and treat the drains and harborage on a cycle that matches how the kitchen and bar operate.

In a home, once the source is gone the adults die off within a couple of weeks and no new ones appear. If they do, something is still fermenting, and we will come back to find it.