Yahoo Lifestyle 
Aussie woman's genius hack for getting rid of fruit flies: 'Driving me insane'
There’s nothing worse than going to your fruit bowl to pick up an apple as a midday snack, only to be greeted by a swarm of pesky fruit flies in your face.
Once they arrive as unwanted houseguests, it seems like nothing you do can ever get rid of them.
According to Good Housekeeping, fruit flies can lay up to 500 eggs at a time and even worse, those eggs hatch within 24 hours.
Now, one Sydney woman has revealed her genius hack for bidding them farewell once and for all, with a cheap and effective method.
The woman, who had tried all the usual apple cider vinegar and dish soap concoctions in the past, stumbled upon this trick by chance.
“I realised I could use red wine when I left a glass out and came back in the morning and it had a bunch of flies in it,” she told Yahoo Lifestyle.
“I didn’t realise that wine would work so well – I’d tried traps with apple cider vinegar and dish soap before but it’s never worked as well as this."
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Fruit flies are attracted to ripe and rotting fruit and vegetables, things like beer and wine, bins and cleaning rags, so the mixture was the perfect solution for the woman’s fly problem.
She told us she first realised she had an infestation of the critters after moving into a new place and there was a “plague of them”.
“Every time I moved a piece of fruit, about 20 would fly off, and it was driving me insane," she said.
First things first, the woman took a glass jar and filled it ¾ ways up with water. While from the photos it might look like there is a lot of wine in the mixture, it’s actually 90% water.
She then added a few splashes of red wine and some dish soap.
Then, she sealed the top of the jar with glad wrap and poked a few holes in the top with a fork. She secured the whole thing together with a rubber band to keep it all in place.
“The first time I tried, I didn’t get the water level high enough so the flies would fly in and then have enough room to fly out,” she said. “It seems to work best when there’s only a little gap between the top of the water and the plastic wrap.”
Now, the jar with the mixture lives on her windowsill next to her fruit bowl and the results speak for themselves.
In photos shared with Yahoo Lifestyle, you can see the shocking amount of fruit flies that have built up in the jar over the space of the last three weeks.
“I have had so many replies with people saying they're going to try it,” the woman, who shared the hack to her Instagram account, said.
According to Healthline, people should first search for the source of the fruit fly infestation, before cleaning that surface and disinfecting it.
As the drain in the kitchen sink is also a common area to find the bugs, they recommend using a heavy duty cleaner such as bleach to flush them out.
If that doesn’t work and you’ve tried a number of home remedies, such as the one above or a store-bought trap, they say it might be time to call in an exterminator.
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