Friday, May 3, 2013

DIY Wasp Traps: A More Attractive Alternative

Bees.  More specifically, wasps.  Yellow jackets.  Those nasty little assholes of the insect world.  Aggressive, in your face, with a painful sting.  I happen to be one of those lucky bastards who is allergic to them.  And I can't escape them.  In my house it's a constant battle because yellow jackets have made quite a home in my neighbor's shed.  In the place where I lived before this home, it was a nightmare when they bored their way into my apartment and enacted an all out assault on my family. 

Last year it was so bad that there were many days that my potted garden went dry because I could not water it amongst the swarming wasps.  Last year I found a recipe for a homemade wasp trap and I went to town with it.  It was the old plastic bottle trick, which I will be detailing in a different blog entry.  Like a crazy woman, I started to hang plastic bottles filled with simple syrup around the outside of my house.  I painted some of them in an effort to make them look somewhat decorative, but at the end of the day, they were plastic bottles.  The positive side was that I could make a million of them because I had a million plastic bottles.  (ok, maybe not a million, but you get the gist) The negative side, they are ugly. So this year I discovered an updated version of the plastic bottle bee trap.  This one involves jars.

Take one jar.  In case you live under a rock, here's the homesteader blog obligatory picture of a jar:



I painted the outside of the jar with some acrylic paint.  I researched which colors would attract bees and got conflicting results.  Some claimed that white and yellow repelled bees, and some claimed that those colors attracted bees.  I figured I would give light colors a try and see what happens. 



I filled the jar part way with simple syrup.  Simple syrup is just that.  Simple.  The ingredients are:


A cup or two of water, depending on your need
A buttload of sugar

For this wasp trap I used brown sugar because that's all I had in the house.  I don't know if this will change the result at all.  All you do is boil the water and sugar until it has a thick syrupy consistency. 
Then I took the lid of the jar and poked a hole about the size of my pinky.  You want the bees to be able to get in but have a hard time getting back out. 

The added step in this wasp trap is to take some jelly and spread it on the under side of the lid.  Leave it out and let it dry a little so it sticks to the lid.  When the wasps enter the trap they will walk on the jelly and get their feet all sticky. This will cause more of them to fumble and end up helplessly drowning in the simple syrup. 


Place this trap away from gathering points in your yard to not only kill the wasps, but to attract them to something other than you and your family.
Please keep in mind that these wasps traps are most effective after they have been sitting in the sun for a few days. So don't be discouraged if there is not much action in your traps for the first day or so.

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