What Are These Tiny Flies In My House?
While most pests can be considered nuisance pests, flies take the cake when it comes to being the kings of annoyance. Given flies can breed in almost every climate, you’d be hard pressed to go anywhere on the planet and not find yourself still dealing with them in one way or another. And no matter how hard we try to avoid them, flies continue to make their way into our homes as if they’ve always been there; so what exactly are these tiny flies in my house?
Common Flies Encountered At Home
Most commonly we find flies in the home tend to be drain flies, fruit flies, or phorid flies. Each are slightly different in their preferred environment and food source, but all of them generally need some form of standing water to survive. Most are so tiny that you won’t even notice them until they’re in your face or buzzing around a light.
Fruit flies prefer, as their name implies, fruit, whether fresh or rotted, extending to vegetables and garbage in general.
Drain flies tend to hang around drainage lines to and from basically anywhere, which is part of why these little buggers are so hard to get rid of.
Phorid flies enjoy a mix of both drain and fruit fly characteristics, taking what they can get from drainage, sewage, rotting foods and even decaying organisms, which to be fair, most people don’t have laying around.
Each of these flies are generally black or brown and smaller than a newborn babies pinky nail. They all live extremely short lives, about 1-3 weeks at most, but their eggs are frequently laid throughout their lifespan and en masse ensuring that you won’t just find one wherever you do.
Luckily for us, all these flies: fruit flies, drain flies and phorid flies – if you take away their ideal environment, you’ve pretty much guaranteed their future destruction.
How Can I Get Rid Of These Tiny Flies In My House?
As we said just above, by taking away these pesky flies ideal environment, there’s a very good chance they’ll either leave or die off. With each of them, cutting off their access to any food is a great way to start. This means storing your food in containers as well as cleaning up any possible spills or crumbs, especially in hard to reach spots like between and under appliances as well as the appliances themselves. The same goes for wiping up any water or other liquids sitting around.
For drain flies, we’d suggest cleaning the suspected drain or drains using drain cleaners designed to strip away build up along the drain piping. Drain flies will feed off any available organic material they can that might be growing, so by simply cleaning your drain, you will also remove a major food source for drain flies. Afterward, we suggest using an adhesive cone trap to capture surviving drain flies over the next couple of days. Note most drain flies show up on rarely used drains so it’s not likely you have them if you don’t have unused drains. If you know you’re going out of town for a bit, we suggest using a drain plug to prevent any possible outbreaks while you’re gone jut to be safe.
For getting rid of fruit flies, simply keep your foods secure and contained, stored away and not left out in produce bags. Fruit flies excel in finding food sources wherever they might be in your home. They can feed on anything from the smallest crumb you might often miss, to your bananas ripening on your counter to rotten food in your trash. Keep all of these out of their reach almost guarantees you won’t ever see these buggers flying around your kitchen, home or buzzing by your face. Once you’ve secured your foods, if you still see these guys flying around, there are a variety of fruit fly traps available, both commercially produced and homemade that can be quite effective.
Lastly, phorid flies as you now know are basically a combination of fruit flies and drain flies. You can use a combination of techniques for getting rid of them like: ensuring your drains are both clean and closed when not in use, storing your food properly, as well as your trash and keeping the outside of your home free of any decaying matter whether plant or animal as this will help prevent flies from being near your home to begin with.
We Are Always Here To Help
At the end of the day, there’s only so much a homeowner can do to rid themselves of flies in their home. Knowing is half the battle, the rest is putting experience to work which we have decades worth here at MasterGuard.
If you don’t want to deal with the headache of finding where these annoying flies in your house are coming from, give your local MasterGuard branch a call, first time pest inspections are completely free and we can treat any problem we may find, fly or otherwise, right then and there so you won’t be asking yourself what are these tiny flies in my house ever again!
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