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Exterminator Guild

What are these tiny flies in my kitchen?

The short answer

Where they gather tells you which they are. Fruit flies hover around produce and recycling and have red eyes. Drain flies are fuzzy, moth-like, and rest on walls near sinks and floor drains. Fungus gnats are dark and slender and come from overwatered houseplants.

The tape test for drain flies

Tape a piece of clear packing tape sticky side down over a floor drain or sink drain overnight, leaving a small gap for airflow. Flies emerging from that drain get caught on it. It costs nothing, it identifies which drain in a building full of them, and it saves a technician an hour.

What each one needs to breed, which is what you remove

  • Fruit flies: fermenting material. Overripe produce, a recycling bin with residue in it, a mop bucket, a spill under an appliance. They also breed in the film inside a drain.
  • Drain flies: the organic film lining the inside of a drain or a trap. Pouring bleach down it does almost nothing, because the film clings; the drain has to be physically scrubbed or treated with a bio-enzyme product.
  • Fungus gnats: consistently wet potting soil. Letting the top inch dry out between waterings ends most of them without any treatment at all.

A fly problem that persists after the obvious source is gone usually means the source is not obvious: a drain under an appliance, a cracked drain line under a slab, or something spilled behind a cabinet. That is where a technician earns the call-out.

Also asked

Will spraying get rid of them?
It kills the adults in the room and does nothing to the breeding site, which produces more within days. Every effective approach to small flies is about finding and removing what they are breeding in.

Companies whose reviewers name flies

276 pest control businesses in the United States and Canada have reviewers who write about flies. Every listing shows the full rating distribution rather than the average, the share that is one or two star, and whether the owner replies.

Flies and gnats →

Read next

General information about pest problems and about hiring, not advice about your specific property. Pest control licensing, wildlife protection and landlord and tenant law are all set state by state and province by province across the United States and Canada, so your own regulator is the current answer. How we read the data.