DIY Yellow Jacket Traps

I tried to be Zen, to just live and let live, but then, after a half-dozen stings over as many days, they started flying around between my eyeball and my sunglasses while I was working on fencing with both hands.  Twice they stung me through a shirt while I was standing almost perfectly still, twice they flew up inside my shirt sleeve and stung me in the armpit.  I know they have many benefits, but I just need to reduce the numbers around the cabin front door and the animal area or I can't get anything done.

There are a lot of tutorials on how to make traps for these little guys, this just happens to be what I had available and it works quite well.  These traps are made from clear food containers that I had sitting around.  I hear they are also attracted to bright colors, so it's nice that so many food companies use flashy packaging.

You need:
- Clear rigid food container with screw-on plastic lid (soda bottle would work too)
- Mounting stick - about three feet long and thick enough to hold up the container
- Small round stick ~1/4"- 3/8" diameter
- Bait - I used apple cores
- Lighter
- Knife

Heat the center of the lid of the container briefly with a lighter until shiny, then push the mounting stick through from the outside to get a tight fit.  Then heat another patch of the lid, away from the the center stick, and push the smaller stick through that, also from the outside of the lid.  Pull out this second stick and you should have a hole that tapers inward, hopefully helping guide them in but not out.

Now split the first couple inches of the mounting stick and pinch on a piece of fruit that will rot, meat scraps, cat food... Something like that.  You can use your knife as a wedge to get the bait on further, then pull it out sideways (picture shows this more clearly).  Now thread the rest of the container on so the bait is near the middle of the volume and poke the stick in the ground about 50 feet away from your working area.

The fresh apple cores I used didn't start to work until the second day, then they started rotting and the trap works great.  The daily temperature swing here is enough to either cook or freeze them passively. But the other option is to fill the entire setup with water, then re-bait it and set it up again.  With mine, after about three days some fermenting apple juice began to run down the mounting stick and gather wasps on the outside, so I should have refreshed that trap earlier.

The trap by the cabin has reduced the harassment at the front door by about half.   One would fly inside almost every time I opened the door before, now they rarely do.  I used the inner liner from a cereal bag to make another trap for the animal area.  Same basic concept, with some short branches keeping the bag volume open on the inside and a string cinching all but a small opening at the bottom, we'll see how well that one works.

This is part of the MoPID series of permaculture innovations that I am working on during my time at Wheaton Labs.  Check out the thread if you'd like to follow along.

Quick update and a thing I forgot:

I refreshed the trap near the cabin and it had about 30 wasps in it.  The apple core was almost completely eaten as the picture shows.

I was also reminded by the picture, that I put a tiny amount of red wine in the trap to get it going initially until the apple started to decay.  They seem to enjoy fully fermented fruit juice quite a bit as well.

Maybe a kind of improvement...?

If you put the trap on the end of a curved stick, then you wouldn't have to worry about things like apple juice dripping out of the hole/s you'd made. Perfect for lazy folks like myself, or those on-the-go who wouldn't get around to opening up the trap every day.

Personally, I'd find a way to open this up first thing in the morning and dump out anything that might have crawled inside, and maybe they'd still be alive. With it being so cold in the early mornings round here, they might just be sleeping and not dead. Dumping them out (quite a ways away from home, of course) whenever they're sluggish seems to be the best option.

The one that needs less effort and every clear bottle can be used.

Cut a hole in the apple so that it fits on a clear bottle opening.
The yellow jackets will go inside of the apple and when they will fly away they drop into the water filled bottle.

Works perfect.