Homemade Yellow Jacket Bait Station

This is instructions on how to make a bait station dispenser, not a trap for yellow jackets. A bait station is for holding insecticides which yellow jackets take back to the nest and hopefully feed to the larvae. This is handy if you don’t know where the nest is located.

Now let me start out by stating that yellow jackets are of value in a yard or garden for a bunch of reasons, and be warned they do eat a lot of bugs! If you kill them off you are likely to get other types of bug issues. You can read about that anywhere so I won’t preach. Something I firmly believe is that any creature is about habitat, food availability, and habits. You must know and understand these issues if you wish to eradicate a pest from your environment. The best source we have found for information on yellow jackets are:

Journal of Insect Science- Search for Vespula, which is a yellow jacket.

University of Wisconsin - Researchers study yellow jacket behavior article worth the read.

Oregon State University - Article on yellow jackets. Take a moment to read the .pdf file.

Journal of Environmental Entomology - Which is an absolute bear to go through since it has no search feature for the online versions of the journal and laymen (me) viewers do not have access to a lot of info, but still worth the mention.

Different yellow jacket workers have different tasks, they will eat different bait, etc. The more you understand about yellow jacket habits and needs, the more successful you will be. And please, if you know of any decent resources for Entomology information please leave a comment let us know!

This whole yellow jacket bait station came up in our lives because we are infested with them, and I do mean infested. I’ve been in this state for 25 years and not seen the likes of the population we have this season. Our yard is honestly carpeted in the dang things. I have always lived with yellow jackets, they are present every season. Most years I even know where the nest is and since they have always been out of the way, I have left them alone. But this season forget it. I’m kind of Green Girl here but am ready to hire a crop duster to fumigate all of my land. I wouldn’t be bothering with making yellow jacket bait stations except that we are genuinely infested so I need a lot of them. If I had my ruthers, or if you aren’t plastered in the pests, I recommend buying one of these:

It’s a product called Scent-Ry Deer Dispenser and is used for deer fences. It’s larger than it looks and the part labeled “screen” has holes in it big enough for yellow jackets to fly in and out of, but chipmunks, butterflies, hummingbirds, your neighbor’s darn cat and other critters will have a harder time. The top comes off and it’s easy to clean. They are sold in two packs, which ought to do the normal person just fine. They can be hung or staked into the ground. This would be our first choice.

But we had to go to plan “B” to try to the insecticide to a large number of yellow jacket workers quickly hoping to take down the sheer volume we are dealing with. Purchasing several packs of the Scent-Ry Deer Dispenser grew costly quickly and hopefully we won’t be using bait stations for long or need them again, so we started testing what sorts of containers yellow jackets would take food from. The plan is to try and keep bait stations from being as accessible to other animals. We consider our bait stations disposable after a few uses.

How I did this: Firstly, I purchased small drink containers in the kid’s dishes department of a Walmart/Target type store. They are for children and quite small, and cost under $1.

The very bottom was painted black with spray paint. It was modeled after yellow jacket traps, which work quite well, and we have discovered that yellow jackets need a bit of help entering and exiting a bait station. They need to know that the exits are towards the light, upwards. Also they do not seem to like the bait as it dries out and the dark color helps keep it moist. Do not paint too far up the container as they get easily confused and don’t appear to care to fly towards the darker color where the bait itself is located too much.

Then I cut some holes around the bottle so that the yellow jackets can smell the bait. This was done with a nail. The plastic is thick so cutting trough it is a pain in the buns!

After that, I cut (hacked is more like it) two exit holes on either side of the top - again, yellow jackets seem pretty graceless and kind of bump about the top until they hit one of the holes, but the idea is for them to get the bait and get back out so they can take it back to the nest.

A longer, narrow entrance hole was cut just above the black paint. They seem to tend to fly in here, which would be closer to the bait located in the bottom, and after getting the bait, fly upwards to exit through the top holes. The lid is also left off the plastic bottle so they may fly out that way. All of the holes were made small to keep the bait out of reach of other critters. Pay attention to this!! Think about it - if you are using jelly or sweets for bait, butterflies and chipmunks will want it as well. If you use salmon or other meats, domestic cats will try for it.

We filled the bait stations from the top through a metal funnel, using a disposable wood shish kabob skewer (available inexpensively at the grocery - if I recall, a pack of 50 was about $2-3 and handy around the house anyway for poking random things). We also cleaned them out with disposable shish kabob skewers. Big warning - ALWAYS USE METAL to mix insecticides if it is not something you will be disposing of! Don’t be mixing bait in a plastic bowl, okay? Plastic can absorb chemicals, but metal will not. Clean clean clean - and then clean again - anything that touches an insecticide. The insecticides used for yellow jacket bait traps are often fairly concentrated and a tiny bit goes a long way. They are a meant to be diluted and a heck of a lot stronger - therefore nasty - than a pre-mix.

The bait is poison, please respect that! These bait stations could be hung easily enough by a wire in locations other animals can’t get to.

If you try this, please leave a comment. It will help the next person with a similar problem. We have had a devil of a time with this issue ourselves and would appreciate!