Yesterday, I mentioned the large number of spiders that seemed to be hanging around and trying to move into our houses this time of year. It seemed to spark a bit of conversation and a couple interesting suggestions on how to deal with them.
Just to be clear, I do not think burning down you house or your vehicle is a good way to get rid of spiders. Let’s be honest, they’re too quick. They would just leave ahead of the blaze and go wait for you someplace else.
But we’ll come back to spiders.
The topic of conversation moved on to fruit flies. There are lots of fruit flies around at this time of year. It’s almost as if there was a lot of fruit getting ripe or something. And where do they come from? You can bring fruit into your home, which has no fruit flies, carefully wash the fruit to ensure you haven’t brought any bugs in with you and within an hour of letting the fruit sit around… bam!… you got fruit flies.
I know a lot of people that use either cider vinegar or wine to make traps for fruit flies. They work, although I’m not a big fan of sharing my wine with a bunch of bugs. But most days it seems like they are going to get in there anyway, so you may as well use it to trap them. And whoever said “you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar” never met fruit flies. They seem to like the vinegar.
But maybe we can combine the spiders and the flies. When you get your house filling up with fruit flies, you invite the spiders in to eat the fruit flies. But how do you get rid of the spiders? According to some people, you can spread peppermint oil around and the spiders will move out.
However, the peppermint oil will make the house smell like candy canes and that will attract Santa. So suddenly instead of flies and spiders, you have a house full of elves building toys. The flies and spiders could be a bit less intrusive. And I have no idea how to get rid of elves.
At least with the flies, there is a bit of a solution. Those home made traps do seem to work.
