If you grow fruit,
it is actually your responsibility to actively control fruit fly in your back yard. It is heartbreaking to be nurturing a fruit tree for years, sustained by the anticipation of your first juicy fruit only to have your dream shattered by a tiny, flying bug and its larvae.
FRUIT FLY TRAPS
Bad news for controlling Fruit Fly in fruit trees and homemade pest solutions… Homemade Fruit Fly traps only generally trap the male flies, and are only effective while they are fresh. Nearly all the insects they trap are not even Fruit Fly. Their only practical use is as a monitoring tool to see how many Fruit Flies are around.
With Fruit Fly in fruit trees and homemade pest controlideas it’s hard Exterminators to give you a sure-fire solution.If you happen to live outside of a Fruit Fly area you are blessed. They are a real problem for us folks who don’t!
Want to know how to get rid of Fruit Flies? Forget it! The best you can hope for is to minimize the damage they do to your fruit, and this requires a combination of different strategies:
FRUIT TREE CARE TIPS GUIDE
The best cure is prevention, and the most effective way of preventing pest or disease problems in your fruit trees is to keep them healthy.
Good Housekeeping
Simple, cheap – but why is it common to see fallen fruit left to rot at the base of a tree? This soft fruit is easily available for adults to lay eggs, and will allow numbers to expode. When picking up fruit that has been struck with Medfly, don’t bury it or put it straight into the compost. The eggs and larve can survive. Freezing, cooking or pureeing the fruit will destroy the fly
DESTROY AFFECTED FRUIT
When the adult female Fruit Fly pierces the skin of the fruit and lays her eggs, the wound either weeps or leaves a dimple.
You can arrest the life cycle by removing affected fruit from the tree and sealing them into a black rubbish bin bag and leaving them in the sun for a few weeks before composting them or feeding them to your livestock.
Coversprays
While we always recommend organic gardening methods, in extreme cases we recognise it may be necessary to use pesticides. Hopefully once you have a servere outbreak under control, in future years you can practise less drastic control methods.
ALWAYS read labels, follow instructions concerning withholding periods and NEVER use more than the recommended application rates.
