Homemade Fly Traps

 I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the last few days have been terrible with flies!! I currently have 6 in the house and I am near miserable with the constant buzzing around my head, my food, my clean dishes, and my animals! In an attempt to destroy the population surrounding my house I've been researching, or rather looking up, homemade fly traps. At the moment we can't afford to go to the store and buy one or order one online. In a spur of ingenuity I thought "Why not make my own!" I guess by now you're dying to know if it's working or not.
The first traps that I tried seemed to work, to an extent. Here is my list of traps and their outcomes:

1. The Yeast Trap - This one is rather simple, almost too simple really. All you do is take a bottle, just about any kind will do, pour a packet of yeast in there and add water,set it out in the sun and you're done. From my experience this did a better job catching yellow jackets than flies. I think there were only two flies. Not to mention when I set up my line of traps inside not a single fly was caught withing a 6 hour period. Next! 
2. The Coffee Trap - This one is a as simple as the prior trap. Just pour coffee in a cup, with a little sugar of course, and set it out wherever. Again, inside the house not a single fly was caught, and outside there was only one unlucky visitor. I watched as flies would come to the cup, drink their fill and then leave. This also happened with a few yellow jackets! Needless to say, I was very unimpressed! 
3. The Vinegar Trap - Another simple trap. Place a little fruit juice inside a jar, pour a little vinegar in, and add a few drops of dish soap. Place a cap on the jar and poke a few holes. Finito! Not a single fly! I guess they weren't impressed. 
4. The Juice Trap - Pour some fruit juice in a jar and add a drop of dish soap. Impressively caught (drum roll please) 0! Yea, I know right?! 
5. The Jelly Trap - Place some fruit jelly in a jar, add a little water and a drop of dish soap. Again, caught 0! 
6. The Jelly W-H-Y Trap - This one is the most different in that the "bait" is placed inside an existing professional wasp trap. I know, I'm trying to catch flies, why in the world am I using a wasp trap, right? Well, because my little brain couldn't stop thinking and I thought maybe if I put some really good "bait" in a real trap the flies would come flocking and they would eventually dehydrate. Upon the first day, I walked out to check my trap that night, to my surprise there were 8 yellow jackets! For you people who know what a W-H-Y trap is you realize that isn't such a big surprise until you understand that there was no "attractant" for yellow jackets in the trap. At least, not any store bought attractant anyway. While there were no flies in the trap I had stumbled upon a cheaper, more effective I might add, attractant for yellow jackets! Today, I caught 17 yellow jackets, 1 wasp, and 3 flies! Each day seems to bring more and more yellow jackets!

Okay, so I'm completely out of ideas as far as fly traps go. I've abandoned my experimenting and taken to the fly swatter, I killed more that way than all the traps combined! But I have obviously found a new yellow jacket trap. The W-H-Y trap has two chambers, a top and bottom. The top is meant for regular paper wasp, the bottom for different species of yellow jackets. If you do make the Jelly W-H-Y trap just make sure you put the jelly in the bottom chamber, the yellow jackets can eventually fly out of the top chamber if given enough time to figure it out!
I haven't effectively found out if this bait can be used for more than one day, but I am going to find out. Since I was putting the bait in the top chamber ( I was trying to catch flies, not yellow jackets) I had to fill the chamber with soap and water to kill the yellow jackets before they flew out, thus rendering my bait useless. I will be putting the bait in the bottom chamber tomorrow morning to see how it works and also to see if the bait can be used more than once.

Here's a little hint. If you do find a liquid bait, such as juice or coffee, that works at catching flying insects, add a drop of dish soap. The soap doesn't immediately kill the insect but instead it breaks the surface tension of the liquid,and instead of landing on the liquid they simply fall through and drown!


I guess as a FLY TRAP post this is rather useless, but I would like to know if anyone else has any homemade fly traps that actually work! Please, please, please! These flies are driving me crazy!!