How To Make a Lemon Fresh Fruit Fly Trap

Instead of plastic wrap, I realized I could just use a small container and make a hole in the lid to use as a permanent, reusable fly trap.

I also found that the flies could be easily disposed of by cooking in the microwave for 15-30 seconds.

The problem with the microwave approach was that the fruit would cook and smell extremely bad, stinking up the house in the process.

About this same time I notice that some of our lemons around the house were going moldy, and had an amazing amount of fruit flies swarming around them.

I was amazed that flies would like lemons so much, so I started experimenting to see if lemons would work in the traps as well, and they did.

The major benefit to using lemons, was that when we nuked the flies in the microwave, it cooked the lemon and released a pleasant citrus smell instead of the putrid smells we were getting before.

As a side note, I've noticed that really fresh lemons may not work as well as ones that are turning bad. If all you have are fresh lemons, just add 1 Tbsp of apple cider vinegar to the bottom of the container along with your lemons and it should make all the difference in catching the flies. It just won't smell as nice when you cook them.