What a grand time of year. Piles of tomatoes and zukes coming to you from your neighborhood gardens; pumpkins, apples and eggplants coming to you from local farms; and me, coming to you from inside a cloud of fruit flies.

There really are more of them around now, drawn by the harvest perfume of ripening and rot, like paparazzi to drunken celebrities.

Sure, killing fruit flies is fun and the most exercise some office workers get in a day. But there's an inexhaustible supply of them. Where do they come from? And is there any way to get rid of them, all of them, that doesn't involve a flamethrower?

A few hundred years ago, fruit flies were thought to reproduce through "spontaneous generation." This is, of course, silly. Creatures don't just hatch out of nothingness; they enter our dimension through a rift in the space-time continuum, like the one through which single socks escape from the dryer.

(Einstein was working on the Fruit-Fly-Sock Anomaly when he mysteriously lost his notes, but the damage to his hair was already irreversible.)

Fruit flies are so maddeningly ubiquitous because any produce you bring indoors becomes an all-you-can-eat nursery for species of Drosophila. You're well-acquainted with Drosophila melanogaster, and not because she runs the food festival at the Greek Orthodox church.

D. melanogaster runs the food festival in your fruit bowl.

Fruit flies lay eggs near the surface of ripe, fermenting foods or anything moist and organic. How many? Something like 500 from one mama. The eggs hatch into tiny white larvae, which ... oh, I'm sorry, were you eating? The larvae don't taint the rest of the fruit, but if you eat the mushy, rotting part where they're feeding, you can suffer diarrhea. Get five servings.

The larvae eat yeast, which consumes fruit and secretes alcohol -- the miracle of birth for booze. Your neighbor's luscious heirloom tomatoes may already have eggs in them when he hands you the bag. Eggs take 30 hours to hatch, and after about a week of chowing down, the larvae will be adults and take off, buzzing your eyeballs and bogarting your Bordeaux.

And breeding. Heavy breeding.

The only way to keep them off your fruit is to eat it immediately or put it in the fridge -- even the tomatoes. You can have them ruined by larvae or by refrigeration. Enjoy.

What else can you do? Take out your kitchen garbage every day. A fruit fly can go from egg to sex-crazed adult in about eight days -- the exact span from when you christen a fresh trash bag with that first soggy piece of lettuce to the evening you haul it to the curb for weekly pickup. If you're prohibited from putting garbage out until the night before pickup, you have no choice. Start shopping for a flamethrower.

Even if you give up produce and live on hot dogs and aerosol cheese, fruit flies can still breed in trash cans, empty bottles and cans (your recycling bin), garbage disposals, drains and even wet mops and sponges. Spilled juice under the fridge. Expired ketchup poured down the sink. The rag you mopped beer off your counter with! A tiny bit of scunge between your floor tiles! And even if you get rid of them all, more can come in through a tiny tear in a screen when they smell the lemon you're putting in your gin and tonic.

Your only hope of keeping the fruit-fly population down is to seal up, wash away or dry out every last blessed sticky spot of organic material in your home, replace all your screens AND eliminate every airborne adult you see with extreme prejudice. I found a good, cheap method online:

Take a glass or jar or vase and put a little cider vinegar or a slice of banana at the bottom. Then roll a sheet of writing paper into a funnel shape, secure it with tape and rest it pointy-end down in the jar.

Fruit flies fly in, but they don't fly out. You can wait for them to die, drive them out to the country or release them in your boss's office.

Provided your boss doesn't have a flamethrower.