One of my mother’s favorite aphorisms was “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.” I found it incredibly irritating. I was a political activist even in high school and my mom usually trotted out the saying when I was trying to stop someone from doing something evil who wouldn’t be stopped by appealing to their better nature… largely because they had none.
At any rate, the saying is a lie even in the literal sense. We have an outbreak of fruit flies. We always have a lot of fruit around, this is the tropics, and we don’t employ insecticides, so this is something that happens. That’s a small glass with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in it above and, as you can see, I have cought flies in it. Enough (since I took the photo) that they are no longer buzzing around being anoying and infecting more of our fruit. It works well.
Honey would not.
—2p