I love summer for a lot of reasons: the slower schedule, the pleasant weather, the outdoor dining.
But I don't love the bugs.
Maybe it's just my house, but between the kids banging in and out all day (often leaving the door wide open) and the fresh fruit we keep on the counter (peach season!), our kitchen turns into a paradise for fruit flies, houseflies, horseflies, and sugar ants. Keeping them out can be a full-time job.
In addition to the baits, traps, and swatters I keep on hand, I've added a new weapon to my arsenal. It's something I stumbled across unexpectedly, and I'm shocked by how well it works: Dawn Powerwash Dish Spray.
Dawn Dawn Platinum Powerwash Dish Spray
How I stumbled across this magic new use for Dawn.
It's not much of a secret that Country Living editors love Dawn dish soap. Besides being great at cleaning dishes, the classic blue squeeze-bottle stuff can get paint out of clothes, make porch screens look new again, and even unclog a toilet. It's great!
I've also been a fan of their Powerwash dish spray—which comes out already in foam form, for easily spot-scrubbing dishes—since it debuted in 2019. But I only discovered its use as a bug killer this summer, during a particularly bad outbreak of fruit flies.
I keep a countertop compost bin by the sink. It's great for cutting down on food waste, and fantastic for my garden, but it's also a feeding ground for fruit flies.
After setting up vinegar traps to get as many of the buggers as possible, I'd taken to stalking around my kitchen, wildly clapping the air at every stray fly I saw. They would choppily dance about, easily avoiding my clumsy hands. And seconds after I'd see one, it would somehow disappear, then show up again, somewhere else.
One day, at the kitchen sink, I saw one land on the compost bin. I slowly lifted up the spray bottle I was holding, aimed it, and squeezed the trigger. A jet of foamy soap shot out and enveloped the fly, which became stuck! Taking my time, I grabbed a napkin and casually wiped it away, cleaning a bit of dirt off the bin in the process. After a few days, this became my go-to move whenever a fly landed on something.
Then one day I found a housefly buzzing around. I didn't have my flyswatter at hand, but the spray bottle was right there. So I sprayed. It worked as well, if not better. Once covered in foam, the fly quickly stopped buzzing and died.
I'm not the only one to discover this. Youtuber Tink TV has a video where she shows how effective it is on ants that have invaded her kitchen.
Why it works.
It turns out that soap and alcohol—the two main ingredients in Dawn Powerwash—are both great at killing insects. The soap clogs up insects' breathing tubes, essentially drowning them. Alcohol dries them out as well. And most importantly, the fast jet of foam traps them, making it difficult or impossible for them to fly away.
The best part is that the soap itself is gentle and multi-purpose, meaning that you can comfortably spray it onto glass, wood, tile, or even some fabrics (kitchen table cloths have not been a problem) and whether you get the bug or not, you just wipe it off, and all you've done is clean a little! It's a win-win.
Since my discovery, I've used Dawn Powerwash to get rid of countless fruit flies, dozens of houseflies, a couple mosquitoes, and I even dealt with a couple hornets that were building a nest right outside my back door—where I could just open the door wide enough to spray them and get back inside before they could react.
I definitely would not recommend doing that last one without protection. A can of wasp spray that shoots at least 25 feet is much safer. However, the dish soap absolutely killed two of the wasps, and the third one that escaped didn't come back to the nest, so I'm counting it as a win!
Christopher Michel
Chris is the Senior Food & Garden Editor at Country Living, where he covers all things edible or growable. He has two kids and a big dog, and lives in Birmingham, AL.
