You can make effective sticky insect traps at home using a few cheap materials: a colored backing surface, a sticky coating like petroleum jelly or a sugar solution, and something to hang or stake the trap in place. The whole process takes about 10 minutes, and the results work surprisingly well for common pests like fungus gnats, whiteflies, aphids, and thrips.
What Makes Sticky Traps Work
Sticky traps rely on two things: visual attraction and a surface insects can’t escape. Most flying pests navigate partly by color, so the trap’s backing lures them in. Once they land, the adhesive holds them. There’s no poison involved, which makes these traps safe to use around food plants, pets, and kids.
Yellow is the go-to color for DIY traps. It attracts the widest variety of pests, including fungus gnats, whiteflies, aphids, and sharpshooters. If thrips are your main problem, blue is more attractive to them specifically. For most situations, yellow covers your bases.
Materials You’ll Need
For the backing, you want something rigid or semi-rigid that you can coat in color and adhesive. Good options include:
- Plastic plates or cups in yellow (or painted yellow)
- Cardboard or cardstock painted bright yellow or blue with acrylic paint
- Plastic sheets cut from containers or folders, easy to cut to any size
- Strips from plastic grocery bags for a lightweight flypaper-style trap
For outdoor use, plastic is the better choice. Cardboard absorbs moisture and breaks down in rain, while plastic plates and sheets hold up through weather and are easy to wipe clean and recoat.
Three DIY Adhesive Options
Petroleum Jelly
This is the simplest and most reliable option. Spread a thin, even layer of petroleum jelly (Vaseline) over your colored backing. It stays tacky for days, doesn’t run in moderate heat, and is easy to reapply. The University of Florida’s extension service recommends this method for homemade traps, and it doubles as a sticky barrier when smeared around plant stems to block ants from reaching aphid colonies above.
Honey or Sugar Solution
For a flypaper-style trap, coat thin plastic strips with a thick honey or sugar solution. Heat equal parts sugar and water until the sugar dissolves completely, then keep simmering until the mixture becomes syrupy and viscous. Brush or pour a thin layer onto your plastic strip and hang it with string or a thumbtack. This method works well indoors for flies but has a downside outdoors: rain washes it away quickly, and it can attract ants.
Non-Toxic Sticky Barrier Products
Garden stores sell tubes of non-toxic insect barrier adhesive, sometimes called “Tanglefoot” or similar. These are thicker and stickier than petroleum jelly and last longer before needing reapplication. If you’re making traps in bulk for a garden, this is worth the small investment. Apply it the same way: a thin, even coat over your colored surface.
Step-by-Step Assembly
Start by cutting or selecting your backing material. For hanging traps, rectangles roughly 4 by 6 inches work well. For potted plants, a small plastic plate or even a piece of yellow cardstock on a popsicle stick does the job. If your material isn’t already yellow or blue, paint one side with acrylic paint and let it dry completely before adding adhesive. Acrylic dries in about 20 minutes.
Once dry, spread your chosen adhesive in a thin, even layer across the painted side. You want enough to trap a small insect on contact, but not so much that it drips. With petroleum jelly, a layer about the thickness of a credit card is plenty. Poke a hole in the top if you plan to hang the trap with wire or string. For garden use, you can clip the trap to a bamboo stake with a binder clip or clothespin.
Place the trap near the problem area. For houseplants with fungus gnats, position the trap just above the soil surface where adults emerge. For whiteflies and aphids on garden plants, hang traps at canopy height, right among the foliage where the insects are feeding. You’ll typically see results within a day or two.
Protecting Beneficial Insects
One real drawback of sticky traps is that they catch things you don’t want to catch, including pollinators, ladybugs, and lacewings that eat the very pests you’re targeting. Researchers found a clever workaround: covering the sticky surface with a layer of tulle, the fine nylon mesh fabric sold at fabric stores for veils and tutus.
The mesh acts like a sieve. Small pests pass through the holes and get stuck, while larger beneficial insects stay on top and can fly away. In testing, tulle-covered traps reduced fly bycatch by 95 percent and brought other non-target captures to zero, all without reducing detection of the target pest. If you use this method, choose gold or glittery tulle rather than white or plain yellow. White tulle altered the trap’s color enough to make it less attractive to insects, while gold glittery mesh blended in and kept the trap just as effective.
To add tulle, simply stretch a single layer over your sticky surface and secure it around the edges with tape or a rubber band. Replace the tulle when it gets too covered in debris to let small insects through.
Maintenance and Replacement
Check your traps every few days. Once a trap is covered in insects or dust, it loses its stickiness and stops working. For petroleum jelly traps, you can wipe the surface clean with a paper towel and reapply a fresh layer. Sugar-based traps are harder to refresh and are better replaced entirely.
Outdoors, expect to recoat or replace traps every one to two weeks depending on conditions. Rain, dust, and high heat all shorten a trap’s useful life. Petroleum jelly holds up better than sugar solutions in warm weather, though extreme heat can cause it to thin and slide off vertical surfaces. In very hot climates, consider angling traps horizontally or using a commercial sticky barrier product, which has a higher melting point.
Getting Adhesive Off Your Hands
If you’ve ever handled a sticky trap, you know the residue clings to everything. The best household remedy is coconut oil, which dissolves sticky adhesive quickly and rinses off with soap and water. Peanut butter also works well, since its oils break down adhesive in the same way. Olive oil and vegetable oil will do the job too, though they take more scrubbing. For surfaces and tools, a paste of baking soda mixed with a little vegetable oil is effective: rub it on, scrub, and rinse with hot water. If you have pets that get into a trap, butter or shortening rubbed into the stuck area will neutralize the adhesive without pulling out fur or feathers.