Discover How to Get Rid of Fruit Flies with Lemon and eliminate an infestation in your home. Learn how to identify the flying insect, its life cycle, and the damage it causes in your life. Find out how you can prevent these flies from using home remedies that are simple to do.
What Are The Fruit Flies?
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Fruit flies are holometabolic insects that have four stages of growth and development in their life. These flies are native to Africa, and today you can see in the country you live in. They are flying insects with a varied activity where they focus on spring and summer, never winter.
These fruit flies keep the name since they love apples, grapes, bananas, or even citrus fruits. They are disease-carrying flies, covering 60% of the distribution of germs and bacteria throughout the world. Like all flies, they always flock looking for fruits fermenting in your garden or other areas.
These flies are annoying because their reproduction and growth process is very fast compared to other insects. You can see eight generations of fruit flies in your garden or around your food in one year. Since the flying insect loves fruit, this does not mean that it has feeding habits common to house flies.
How to Identify A Fruit Fly
Before you know How to Get Rid of Fruit Flies with Lemon, you should know how to identify them in seconds. A fruit fly, male or female, have large eyes, their color is yellowish-brown or light brown. On their body, they have stripes that for the male flies are a little thicker than in the females; they are black.
A female fruit fly is larger than the male fly; it has three legs all over its body. You can easily identify fruit flies by being tiny in size to a housefly. The yellowish color stands out above other flying insects, easy to identify and avoid in your home from now on.
The Life Cycle Of A Fruit Fly
As they are holometabola flies, they have four stages of life cycles that span 29 days until they have a new generation. A fruit fly goes through the egg, larva, pupal stage, and finally, the adult stage, ready to reproduce. It is easy to suffer from a fruit fly infestation since, in a year, they can have up to 8 generations.
The fruit fly’s egg stage or cycle has a striking white color, with a long, circular shape at its ends. You can identify a fly egg by its simple appearance and size no larger than 2 millimetres. These eggs are usually in the fruits; from there, the new generation emerges a few days after conception.
As a larva, a fruit fly has a length of at most 15 millimetres; they are white and somewhat wide. The pest’s entire body has 11 segments that divide the head, abdomen, and thorax for its adult stage. At this stage, the fly feeds on the fruit where it was incubated, preferably its pulp.
Being a pupa, the fruit fly already has a more defined shape; its white color disappears and changes to yellowish-brown. A fly pupa is around 10mm maximum with a diameter of 3.25mm in its semi-adult stage. Finally, the fruit fly reaches its final cycle as an adult, achieving its wings and its characteristic yellowish-brown color.
Also Read: How to Get Rid of Mayflies Naturally
Damage Caused By Fruit Flies
Serious indirect damage that this flying insect has is causing restrictions between countries to export fruits. If you live in a country where there is a fly infestation, the fruit export may be ruled out. This can damage a country’s economy by not exploiting the natural resources in its environment.
Knowing the natural way to remove fruit flies with lemon is important to free yourself from damage. You can bet your grain of sand by eliminating the infestation from your home using home remedies. The fruit infested by the fly can also be harmful for the population; all this can be lost.
You can suffer direct damage when the female fly bites the fruit for its oviposition stage in the new generation. This action tends to decompose the pulp quickly, causing you to lose the harvest in your garden. If you live from what you sow, this pest may make you lose a lot of money with a simple bite on your banana, apple, etc.
You must know how to eliminate the fruit flies with home remedies to eliminate it from your planting. If you do not take the necessary measures, you could lose a lot of money by having a harvest with early-ripening fruits.
How To Eliminate Fruit Flies With Lemon?
Learn the ways to Get Rid of Fruit Flies with Lemon by following these steps:
- Chop a lemon in half; you can use any lemon or lime you have in your country.
- Add pieces of cloves to the lemon’s cut surface; you have to introduce them very well. These cloves are very cheap, and you can buy them in any store close to your home.
- Lemon itself is a natural repellent for these fruit flies because they associate the aroma with its pulp. A fruit fly will never lay its eggs on this fruit; they focus on the sweets. As part of another solution, you can place some lemon plants around your planting to repel flies.
How To Prevent Fruit Flies?
Other ways that you can prevent fruit flies in your home include:
Use the onion
The fruit flies do not surround the fruit bowl. You can place a piece of cut onion in it. The fly will not feel desire for your fruits with the smell, although you must prevent the onion from rotting. Try to change the onion from time to time to serve as an anti-fly repellent every day.
Cover your fruits
If you have exposed fruit in your kitchen with an attractive odor, this will be enough to fly infestation. You can cover the fruits with a thick tarp or other items that dissipate their smell. It is important that you completely cover the area, that there is no access for the fruit-loving flying insect.
Eliminate spoiled fruit
You have to dispose of the rotten fruit at home; it doesn’t matter if it’s in the garbage can, get it out of there. These fruits only attract flies, so in no time, you will be suffering from an infestation. As additional information, you can clean your whole house to dissipate fruit throughout your home.
