As I sat at the computer tonight writing a blog entry about the horrendous state of my car, I found myself distracted and in fact fascinated by the sight of my wife’s campaign to kill our latest unwanted tenants….   our fruit flies.   Apparently, we owe the honor of their presence to a big pile of bananas on our kitchen counter that we kept around (apparently a little too long) to use for banana bread.  The bananas are long gone and the banana bread all eaten, but the fruit flies are still buzzing around as though auditioning for one of the Seven Plagues of Egypt.  At least they’re small and silent and stinger-less,  unlike flies and mosquitoes and bees,  but they are still a maddening nuisance – – – the kind of creature one wishes Noah had left off his Two-by-Two  inventory list for the ark.

So Kathy went on line to find some ideas on how to rid our house of these unwanted visitors or at least cut down the population – without spraying chemicals all over the place – and the idea which most intrigued her was this one:

Take a rather squat-shaped glass – and pour some fruit- based wine into it.

Cover the the top of the glass with saran wrap and make sure it’s on tight.

Poke holes in it with a fork.

Set the glass out where the fruit flies like to congregate-  and watch as they are irresistibly  drawn to the wine – sneak through the holes – and then find themselves unable to get out again.

Kathy did as instructed, except that she opted for a toothpick instead of a fork for making the holes. . .  put out the glass

. . .  and then waited and waited and waited.  It took awhile but finally the fruit flies started showing some interest,  although none of them was actually “taking the plunge” – but once she had grabbed a fork and made some slightly bigger holes with it, the swarm began in earnest.   And there was my wife,  observing it all with this curious expression on her face. . .  anxious and impatient at first,  then encouraged and hopeful, and finally quite pleased with herself – although I have to confess to feeling some disquiet at seeing the homicidal dark side of her personality.

Watching the fruit flies make their way into my wife’s little Glass of Death brought me back rather jarringly to my rough little apartment back in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1984, where I lived with a guy named Todd Bane and literally hundreds of uninvited insects. . . most of them from the roach department.  Many nights I would walk into the kitchen, turn on the light,  and see roaches scampering everywhere- and after seeing that sight the hardest thing in the world was to crawl into bed and not feel like I had roaches crawling all over my body.  Finally,  with sprays having done nothing at all to curb their numbers,  I decided to try something relatively new on the market. . . the Roach Motel.    And I think one of the loveliest sights I’ve ever seen was the morning after I put out my first motel next to the refrigerator when I picked up that motel, looked inside, and saw an amazing conglomeration of legs, wings, antennae of dozens of creepy crawlers who had wandered into the motel and gotten stuck there by the sticky goo on the bottom surface.  I felt GLEE . . .   and practically skipped to the hardware store to purchase two more – and two more after that – and two more after that.   Only  later did it occur to me what a nasty slow death this was . . . although that realization did not cause me so much as a moment of regret.   The moment those roaches started crawling around my pasta was the moment that a reservation was made on their behalf for a certain hotel that came highly recommended.

Anyway,  as I finish typing this I count eight fruit flies floating in the wine and four more trapped in the glass and soon to join them.  At least they enjoyed a last stiff drink in their final moments of life.

  1. ** *   Update –  It’s now Thursday night, and that glass is still sitting on the counter by the sink . . .  and I counted the corpses of around 70 fruit flies floating in the wine.  Apparently fruit flies like White Zinfandel as much as we do.

pictured:   Kathy watching her Glass of Death do its thing.