1. Keep fruit and other fresh produce in the fridge or pantry, as fruit flies are attracted by the smell of fruit and fermentation, so storing them properly prevents them from being drawn indoors.

2. Clean up any spilled fruit juice, alcohol, squashed fruit or similar immediately, as the flies are also attracted to fermented drinks and food scraps left lying around.

3. Take out garbage frequently and certainly make sure it does not sit in the bin for longer than a week, as a single mated female can lay around 300 eggs during that time – bringing a whole new generation of the pests in the space of a few days.

4. Wash store-bought fruit immediately upon bringing it home, as fruit flies may have already laid eggs on fruit in stores or gardens.

5. Fruit flies are too small to swat: use a vacuum cleaner to catch adult fruit flies instead.

6. Use commercial sticky traps, trap bags, aerosols or other anti-fruit fly products available in stores.

7. You can make your own homemade trap by, for instance, putting wine or fermented juice in a glass, rolling a piece of paper into a cone with a small hole at the tip, and taping it to the glass, so the insects can enter but cannot escape.

8. Another homemade trap option which Maaleht tried involves pouring a little water, apple cider vinegar and dishwashing liquid into a plastic cup and covering it with a lid with a hole in it, attracting the fruit flies, which again cannot then get out.

9. The fruit fly epidemic coincides with apple juice and jam making season: where possible, do this work outside, as the process will attract more flies anyway, and might even draw some of those who have made it indoors back outside again.

10. With that in mind, keep all outside doors and windows closed even in the warmest conditions – standard mosquito netting, for instance, is far too coarse to keep out fruit flies, which at 1–4 mm in length can simply fly through the holes.

There is more than one species of fruit fly in Estonia, but the Drosophila species is the commonest – its Estonian name, Äädikakärbsed ("Vinegar flies") also hints at its food of choice. The more recently established sea buckthorn fruit fly (Rhagoletis batava) is another variant.

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