Woman Accidentally Discovers The Perfect Trap for Fruit Flies — All You Need Is Just One Item

Picture this. A stem becomes droopy with juicy tomatoes, another one with melons or grapes, or bananas. As the gardener touches them, he realizes that the fruits are now ripe. He plucks and rips these juicy beauties from the plants and dispatches them to the grocers, from where they end up in the kitchen baskets of humans. In the interim, when these fruits are just sitting in the basket before being eaten, the spiral whiff of their sweet, luscious aroma lingering in the air is somehow caught by the noses of “fruit flies,” just as moths are attracted to the flame.

Notorious and hungry as they always are, these flies gather in gangs and pounce upon the fruits, sticking and latching themselves to their fibrous bodies, and sucking their sweet juice one tiny drop at a time, rendering the fruits mushy and inedible. One woman, named Kelsey Meyers (@kelsey.meyers), has found a way to fight back against these pestering flies. Thanks to her video that homemakers can now live fearlessly, unafraid of these creepy fruit-suckling cooties.

“I must not be the only person who didn't realize that this could happen,” Meyers said and pulled out a golden-and-white bottle containing vinegar. She pulled out another bottle of a dark greenish color, containing balsamic vinegar. She described the instance when she looked at the bottle and was shocked to find dead bodies of fruit flies, some floating in the vinegar and some stuck to the vinegar-laced bottle edges.

“I was looking at it, and […] it looked like there were little fruit flies floating in here. And I thought, 'Oh my God! I cannot believe. How stupid am I to realize that? This is, like, a perfect trap for them,” Meyers reflected. Arriving at this realization, she said, she took some white vinegar and poured it into a glass jar. In the video, she zoomed the camera on the mouth of the cup to reveal dozens of tiny black fruit flies lying dead in the transparent vinegar solution. “But why are there so many?” she wrote in the caption.

“I have no idea if this was coming out into my food? I would have noticed that. I feel like I would have noticed bugs coming into my food,” the woman in the blue t-shirt said on the camera while scratching her head in sticker shock. She picked up the topper-less bottle of white vinegar again, saying that she loved having it on her kitchen counter, but she had no idea that it could trap fruit flies. “Am I the only person who didn't know this? I'm, like, absolutely disgusted right now,” Meyers confessed to the viewers.

The video invited mixed reactions from people. While some of them advised Meyers on how to keep the vinegar clean of the flies, others were amazed at how vinegar could act like an excellent “fruit fly trap.” @leesateresa commented, “I keep my vinegar in the fridge, never out.” @hilariegreen said, “Fruit fly traps are literally apple cider vinegar left on the counter.” @kelst17 shared, “I set out vinegar when I need to trap fruit flies.” @bonn5714 said, “I have caps on my vinegar, especially apple cider vinegar; they [fruit flies] go nuts for that.” Another hack came from @Bluegirl181818: “I’ve been keeping cinnamon sticks in my fruit bowls and it has really been helping.”

You can follow Kelsey Meyers (@kelsey.meyers) on TikTok for lifestyle content and homemaking tips.