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Fruit flies are built to find fermenting fruit. Though small, they can detect the smell of ripe fruits and vegetables from a good distance away; if there's a bowl of fruit on your kitchen counter, there's probably a fruit fly or two looking for a way into your home to get to it. Because these insects are so tiny, they can around windows or doors.
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Come summertime, fruit flies arrive in droves. They're drawn in by the smell of fruit — and by the fungi.
Once inside, they lay eggs on the skin of very ripe or fermenting fruit. They reproduce, and before you know it, you've got yourself a full-fledged fruit fly infestation.
Fruit flies have notoriously fast life cycles; they can go from egg to adult in just eight days. That means that one overly ripe tomato left unused on your counter can give rise to a small fruit fly swarm within a week. Fruit flies are also known for their persistence once indoors. Although a female fruit fly adult will only live about a month at best, she can lay 500 eggs in that short time. The insects don't even need fruit to keep reproducing. Fruit flies can breed in the slime layer inside slow-draining plumbing or on an old, sour mop or sponge. This is why even if you get rid of all your fruit, you can still find your home infested with fruit flies.
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