While the prospect of creating your own homemade stink bug trap may not be for those who are squeamish when it comes to dealing with insects, you will no doubt be saving a great deal of money that might have otherwise been spent on expensive pesticides and contraptions. If you can set up your own trap for stink bugs using common household resources and tools, then with a little bit of deliberate planning and preparation, you may find that you have come up with a foolproof way to eliminate stink bugs or least deal with them, once and for all.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of homemade stink bug traps that you can put together. You don’t need to be a handy person. You don’t need to design anything elaborate. The traps described below are of a nature such that that anyone can put together, using nothing more than common household materials and resources. And of course it helps to be armed with a little bit of knowledge about what exactly makes stink bugs tick. What are they attracted to? What are they afraid of? How do they react to heat, light, and being attacked? What are some of the peculiarities of their instinctive behavioral characteristics? What do they like to eat?
Fruit Traps
It is a well known fact that stink bugs are vegans. Their diet consists exclusively of fruits and vegetable produce. That means that if they happen across an apple, for example, whether it is indoors on your kitchen table, or out on a farm, they will approach the apple, pierce it, and begin to suck the juices out of it.
What is one thing that every trap needs? Bait. And in the case of a fruit trap, the bait will be one or more pieces of fruit, strategically placed on a plate or bowl in a location where any stink bugs who happen to be nearby will be able to detect the aroma of the fruit and then flock toward it.
Now, as the bug starts crawling all over the fruit in order to devour it, you can use the opportunity to vacuum it up. Or, if you don’t want to use a vacuum, you can plan to manually dispose of the bug by placing a domed lid over the fruit dish. The stink bug is now trapped, and you can then carefully move the entire trap toward a trash receptacle where you can attempt to dispose of the bug. Or, if you place the fruit on or adjacent to a strip of fly paper or a piece of duct tape with the adhesive side sticking up, then the stink bug will become stuck to it, and you can then transport it to a trash receptacle (or toilet bowl) that way.
As for what you should do with the fruit once the stink bug has been caught, I would highly advise against you or any other human being eating that fruit, since it will have been contaminated by the bug. However, depending on how much of the fruit has been consumed, you may be able to reuse it for the next time you need to set a trap for them.
Light Traps
Stink bugs are attracted to sources of light. This would explain why it is that you frequently see them hanging out on your windows. They want to go toward the light. Or, sometimes you will them buzz their way into a room and then land on the lampshade of a light that is turned on inside your home. Just turn off all of the other lights in the room and leave the one where you have set the trap on, and watch those stink bugs fly straight toward it. As for how to trap the bug once it lands on the light, you can do any number of things: You can use clear adhesive tape to ensnare the bug so that it gets stuck to the tape and cannot escape. Or you can line the lamp with a chemical substance that is toxic to stink bugs, such as dish soap. (More on that below.)
You can even combine the light trap with the fruit trap. Have a bowl of fruit that is bathed in a source of light from a brightly lit lamp.
The above are just two examples of homemade stink bug traps that you can set up without having to spend money on buying any pesticides or other commercial products.
Debunking A Myth
You may have heard that if you kill a stink bug, you should leave its carcass out, and don’t dispose of it, as this will attract other stink bugs. This has proven to not be the case. While it is true that living stink bugs will emanate what is known as an aggregation pheromone to attract other living stink bugs, this does not carry over into the land of the dead (for this particular species of bugs anyway).
Eco-Friendly Do-It-Yourself Traps
Another positive benefit of using homemade stink bugs traps that you build yourself is that these are environmentally friendly. You can reuse them over and over again, and they don’t cause any harm to the environment, and don’t involve any harmful waste products, as might be the case if you were using a pesticide spray.
Ok I Have Caught A Stink Bug. Now What?
Once you have trapped a stink bug within your trap, you will obviously need to dispose of it. You could simply dump them into a garbage bag or flush them down the toilet. Or, if the idea of coming in close contact with a bug is not exactly your cup of tea, then you could alternatively just vacuum them up from the trap, and then dump the contents of the vacuum into the trash as you normally would.
Good luck!