Fruit

Drosophila Melanogaster; now there is a mouthful. Speaking of mouthful, my wife makes the most phenomenal fresh peach pies. She even mastered making them a sugar-free delicacy. Sometimes she even crowns the pie with plump fresh in-season blueberries. My mouth waters just thinking about those pies. In fact, as I write this, someone called for her recipe. I am not exactly sure what her procedure is other than I see her patiently checking peaches sequestered in a brown paper bag for several days to achieve the perfect degree of ripeness.
When that magic day comes—voila—a scrumptious peach pie! Last week was one of those weeks and we shared pie mounded high with fat-free whipped cream with friends. What a treat and what an artistic delight. Each slice of peach was carefully tipped on end and shingled like the petals of big orange blossom. The pie rapidly became a fond memory.
Unfortunately, there is an extremely distracting tiny fly circling my head. Its diminutive size and amazing speed make a fly swatter a moot point. It’s kind of like calling in a tank to deal with a chipmunk. Normally things like this don’t “bug” me (no pun intended; at least until it sunk in). But this increasingly does. How could there be a fly in the house? Oh no! Mysterious fly number one has been joined in the choreographed aerial display by a tiny acrobatic friend. This is too much.
Finally, it dawns on me that these are those mini pests that I know as fruit flies (scientifically Drosophila Melanogaster, for those of you who experimented on them in your labs). Sure enough, there are a few peaches that didn’t make it into the pie and they are the attraction. I tower over these tiny pests and technically have complete authority over them. That doesn’t seem to matter as they play complete havoc with my concentration. To any impartial observer they’re winning the battle and I am reluctant to admit it. Finally I do, so I can get something done.
Onward to the new Bing.com computer search site for some solution. I won’t boor you with all the details. The solutions were amazing—everyone had a different way to get rid of these pests. They range from homemade traps to sucking them into a hot hairdryer and even attacking them with Windex. It even involved not using certain things for fertilizer around the outside of a home. For those so inclined, there was an obligatory “catch and release” method as well.
Finally, at the bottom of the second page was the disclaimer. The only really effective way to deal with fruit flies is to not permit conditions that attract them in the first place. If not used in a proper and timely manner, many times good things can “spoil” and provide the breeding grounds for bad things. Many of these bad things are “not serious enough for an all out war” and I live with them. Unfortunately that’s not a good solution because they multiply feeding voraciously on anything spoiled and left unprotected. Unlike the fruit flies, the life cycles of these things are not a mere 10 days.
Who would ever guess there are hard lessons to be learned when I start with a scrumptious peach pie?