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This effective, simple, and easy to make homemade fly trap can be assembled in minutes with an empty soda bottle and some old produce as bait. Outdoor protection during any season of the year including summertime picnics.
No matter where you live in the world, there is probably at least part of the year when a fly trap is very much needed! If repelling flies alone isn’t getting the job done, this DIY method is sure to take up the slack.
Are you are one of the folks for whom the water and a penny in a heavy duty ziplock bag aren’t working to eliminate your fly issues? If so, try this different fly trap instead. It is easy to make and the three steps shown in the picture above are described below.
The idea is courtesy of my goat milk farmer who uses it with fantastic success. The picture above shows just how many flies it will trap over the period of a few days!Â
As you can see, the fly trap obviously works well as the picture is of one of the traps behind my goat farmer’s house. It is loaded with several inches worth of dead house flies!
The trick to this fly trap is that it actually catches and traps the flies rather than repelling them like the flybag approach.
The flies get lured into the trap by a potential food source and can’t escape. Bones leftover from making bone broth work well as does old produce.
When the fly trap becomes full of flies, you throw it away and make another one, or two, or three!
Note: If larger biting flies are more of a problem in your area, use this homemade deer fly trap instead.
DIY Fly Trap in 3 Simple Steps
The only supplies you need to make your fly trap are a clean, empty 2-liter plastic soda bottle, some heavy duty packing tape, and some bait. Rotting potatoes work really well for my farmer. The pictures included with the steps show how quickly you can make your homemade fly trap.
- Cut an empty 2-liter soda bottle in two. The bottom half should be larger than the top. Making the cut about 1/4 – 1/3 of the way down the bottle works well (see photo below).
- Remove the cap from the top of the bottle and turn it upside down. Place a few pieces of cut up, rotting produce in the bottom half of the bottle and then, place the upside down, open end of the bottle inside the bottom half (see photo).
- Tape the two halves of the bottle together so they stay secure.
Tips for Using Fly Trap Most Effectively
Note that the better the bait, the more effective these fly traps will be. Here in Florida, potatoes that are soft and starting to rot work extremely well. Any type of decomposing fruit or vegetable would work too – you can try different ones and see which attract flies in your locality most effectively.
Here’s what it will look like after the flies start swarming.
Because you are using rotting food to attract and trap the flies, make sure you place the homemade fly trap in a place where the smell won’t bother you or the neighbors. The trick is to put it in a place close enough to attract the flies away from the area you are trying to keep fly free, but far enough away so you don’t smell or see it. In my experience, the trap will attract flies from a radius of about 50-100 feet/ 15-30 meters.
Let me know if you have tried this approach where you live and what you use as bait inside the soda bottle. Did you find it worked well?
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Tried the bag of water and penny trick last year and no effect. It seemed to attract the flies. Will definitely try this one. My boyfriend collects every soda bottle we ever use so it is time to put them to good use. LOL
We’ve used this method as well and it really works! Another very good source for eliminating flies is the QuickBayt Fly Bait product. It’s considered the best fly repellent for horses on the market. All you do is sprinkle the granules throughout the stable and ground and the flies will literally die within a minute of consumption. Hundreds a day!
Your cheapest source online is at BugRepellentZone.com:
Used potatoes and it worked like a charm!
I’m from Australia and my greatest sucess in catching flies in a similar trap is to use a piece of beef kidney (about plum size) “ripened” in the fridge for about 2 weeks. Put kidney in trap and pour in 2 inches of water. I did this outside and the flies were sparming around in seconds!!
Greetings, fellow Oz dweller! I was using a bit of Kefir . . . had to stop . . oh my!! Fly Apocalypse. They liked it too much – flies got way out of control. Previous to that I was using the bottle trap with powder mix from Bunnings with success. (stinky stinky) I have just come inside from hanging up ziplock bags with water and a NZ copper coin inside. (Curses to the fact we have none of our own any more). I could be imagining it but I feel that the flies are decreasing already. I have put six up around the outside of the house: front, back, and both ends of the clothes line. Here’s to the end of the great Aussie Salute ^_^
I’m gonna try this out this summer,it will be from michigan.ill let you know if it works.
I live in Australia and as the aussie know, we have billions of the critters…I have tried this 2 litre bottle trap so many times using a heap of different attractants and nothing works….it wont even catch one fly.
Ive used sugar syrups, oil and fat from the BBQ, cooked mince meat, fruit, blood and bone mixed with water, I even tried dog poo…..nothing works…I don’t know why it wont work as Ive read so many different articles saying how good these traps work.
I’m an Aussie too and I’ve used good old Vegemite and water and it worked. Give it a go.
Mags,
I’ll have to give it a go in Brisbane! It’s gunna be hard to sacrifice my favourite spread ! Flies don’t deserve that lovely vitamin B.
Bob
I just tried this for the first time, using fresh strawberries. For the first few days it only trapped a handful of flies. But once the berries started to break down, the trap/bait really worked. The day mold first started appearing on the berries it went from a few flies to a whole swarm inside the trap. It’s quite satisfying to see so many of the little buggers trapped in there 🙂
It is essential that all outer surfaces of the bottle be absolutely clean. A tiny drop of food is a feast to a fly and they have no reason to enter the trap if it is available on the outside.
I use a little rotting fruit, sugar water, yeast, and stale beer or wine. Some folks add vinegar, but I figure the mixture makes its own.
Works a charm.
Don’t forget to take the cap off the bottle! Haha, I couldn’t resist, mainly because I just made one of these traps and almost forgot to take the cap off!
I can’t understand why nobody has mentioned fish as bait. Nothing attracts them faster then rotting fish. Try cutting up some mackerel or sardine then adding a couple of inches of water and leave in the sun. (downwind of your house!) Give it a couple of days and you will be murdering them by the hundred! Fresh oily fish seems to work best, hence sardines.
Great post… After a nice day outside, some pesky fies got inside and are driving me nuts! Lol! I’ll try this today!
About the fly’s inability to escape… As I read the responses above, I suspected that it had to do with a tidbit I remembered learning about as a kid, about the fly’s eye being “compound”. If you’ve seen photos of flies, you know what I mean, the eyes seem to be made up of many eyes! I googled it to make sure I was remembering it correctly before posting my reply (lol, I’m particular about being accurate! Lol!) and I came across some interesting info that explains why the trap works so well…
A fly’s vision works in a very unique way. Because of their compound vision, their focus isn’t very good. They are very sensitive to motion, which is why they fly away before getting swatted, as well as having other “visual” (to them) sensitivities, but they can’t see very clearly in the way we do. In fact, they really don’t experience sight the way we do at all. So, based on what I read, it seems reasonable to assume that once they get in, they don’t even realize there is a way out, because they can’t see it! (Woo hoo! Gotcha sucka!!) I didn’t check on wasps, but I imagine their vision works in a similar manner, explicating why the traps work on them as well.
Sorry this is long, but I hope this info on flies’ vision is helpful in your mission to kill these nasty pests! It’s pretty interesting, and reading up on it may even help with swatting efforts for the truly frustrated, like me! Lol!
Again, great post on the trap! Excited to make mine right now!!
The way a fly sees also helps with what I read about a long time ago – “the sweet swat”. You position your hands above and to either side of the fly. When you bring your hands together, the fly flies upward and gets caught between them. With practice, you can judge just how high you need to place your hands to get the timing right…
Lorin,
Yours is the best answer ever! No one else has provided this scientific fact on about why flies just seem to crawl out the same hole they came in on. Even the itty bitty gnats get stuck!
Good on ya!
Bob
Blow flies and bush flies go for a meat bait. You get maggots, which also die – it makes great garden fertiliser eventually. Fruit flies like the sugar & veges. The traps work best if you can put a light-proof lid over the top. Flies go upwards to the light. You want them to get caught around the top edges, not to see that there is a way to the light up through the funnel.
Jeez…where am I going to get empty soda bottles???
I am definitely going to try this out! The flies are terrible out here in the desert during the summer.