In this No Nonsense Beekeeping episode, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey reports the results of his 2021 field trial comparing three commercially available wasp traps: a £5 low‑cost model, a £35 Wasp Bane, and a set of £1 bottle‑cap traps sourced from Bee Equipment. After an accidental wasp invasion of his honey extraction room (held at ~30 °C for a few days), he used the incident as a controlled test environment. He found the £5 trap ineffective—wasps ignored it and could easily escape. The £35 Wasp Bane performed similarly to the cheap bottle‑cap traps in catching wasps, but its design made rebaiting cumbersome and forced the purchase of proprietary activator sachets, raising cost and maintenance issues. The £1 bottle‑cap traps, baited with jam and water, proved equally effective, easy to clean, cheap to rebait, and capable of filling a bottle with wasps within 24–48 hours. Edwards emphasizes that strong, healthy colonies generally need no traps, but small late‑season splits are vulnerable and may require a backup trap. He recommends keeping simple bottle‑cap traps on hand as a low‑cost, efficient solution, using jam‑water bait, and only deploying them when a colony is under serious wasp pressure.
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Today I'm going to show you which one of my wasp traps was the most effective in 2021. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Earlier on this year, I bought a £35 wasp trap, a £5 wasp trap, and a £1 wasp trap. And I showed you all of them. I showed you how they worked, and I said I would come back and show you the results and tell you which one I thought was the best and also the best value for money. The time is now here to show you the results of my 2021 wasp trials. That's what I'm going to do in this video. So before anybody starts bashing me for killing wasps, I'll give you a little bit of background as to why I bought these traps, what I use them for, and how I've used them this year. So I always believe You don't need to use wasp traps. If you keep your bees nice and strong, there shouldn't be any time of the year where you need to religiously put wasp traps in your apiary. A big, strong colony of bees, even a big, strong nuc of bees, should easily be able to overcome any wasp attack. However, very small splits that you make late in the year, two-frame splits, say after August, definitely susceptible to wasp attacks. So it's good to have some of these on hand. Just in case you do come across a colony that's getting attacked badly by wasps. I did not need to do that this year because all of my colonies were really, really strong, apart from one of them that didn't make it, and I didn't get there in time in order to use the trap effectively. However, I had the perfect opportunity to test out these traps, and what happened is I took all of my honey crop off, I went and put it in my extraction room. I keep the temperature nice and warm in there, about 30 degrees, I leave it for a couple of days, and what happened was I went back to the extraction room and the wasps had managed to get into that extraction room. They'd only probably been there for about 24 hours, but it looked like a horrendous swarm in the sky. They were all coming down, all going through this little crack, all going back out again. It was like Christmas had come early for these wasps. So it was the perfect opportunity for me to test out these traps. Really, really good test of all of these traps. The first trap that I'm going to talk about is this one, and I'm going to be so quick on this one as well. This trap was £5 and it was useless, absolutely useless. The wasps just weren't interested in going into it, and then when they went into it, they just found it really easy to get out of it. I watched them going in, I watched them coming out, and I watched them ignore it. Really not a good wasp trap. So straight away I'm eliminating this one. £5, I've got no time for this one whatsoever. The next 2 wasp traps are very, very similar in the way that they work. So you've got essentially somewhere to hang like that, and then you've got a chamber where the wasps go down, they get stuck in that chamber, and then they just get stuck in whatever bait you put in the bottom. One of them's a lot more elaborate than the other one though, and it's got a few more gizmos, and it costs about 35 times the cost. So these ones here, I bought these from Bee Equipment. I think I paid £5 for 5 of these, and then obviously you just use your own bottles. The wasp bane traps, which I thought were going to be really, really good— it's not that they weren't as effective as these, it was they were pretty similar actually in terms of their effectiveness. It was just that one of them was £35 for one and the other one was £1 for one. And the thing that really annoyed me about the wasp banes And it's the reason that I just can't recommend them to you, is that I put it up to do this experiment when all the wasps were going into my extraction room. But I'd previously baited it up about 2 months before, and I had it at home, kind of on my patio where we get lots of wasps. So we have barbecues, and some wasps are interested in it. I probably caught maybe 20 or 30 wasps in it, but the bait that I'd used had gone a little bit moldy. The activator that had gone in there recommended that you had to keep on topping it up. And all I wanted to do with the Wasp Bane was to empty all of the bait juice out and to put some fresh bait juice in there, because I knew that was going to attract the wasps. And the Wasp Bane is designed so you can't do that. It is designed that way. There's no other way to explain it. You can't get the liquid out. It's designed that way in order to make you buy more of them and in order to make you use the activator sachets that cost money. Whereas these ones here were equally as effective, And then when you want to rebait them, you just pop the lid off and pour all of the dead wasps and juice out, clean them out, rebait them, put them back up again. It is as quick as that, and hang it up. So there you go, it's as simple as that. I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail on these because killing wasps isn't a thing that I'm really proud of, and it's not something that I'm going to do every day. But to have something in your armory, in your pickup truck, in your bee shed, when the time I can highly recommend these. So if you keep some of these around, some empty bottles and a jar of jam, because a jar of jam is what I used when I did the honey extraction room, and I caught thousands and thousands of wasps using that. So my fancy recipe is going out the window. I'm just using jam and water going forward. But if you keep these in a position where you've got them really, really easily accessible, and you've got a nuc or a beehive that's struggling really bad from wasps, All you need to do, remove the colony, remove the nuc, replace it with this wasp trap here, either hang it in position or just put it in the exact position of where that nuc is. And believe me, you will get a bottle full to the brim of wasps within 24 to 48 hours. So there we go, that's it for the video. I told you this is going to be a quick one. I just wanted to give you that update though, because I think in the last one I definitely alluded to the fact that the wasp bone was going to be my preferred choice of wasp trap if I needed it. Because of what I've seen from other people using it, and I hadn't actually had a chance to test these ones out for myself. Now that I've done the tests, now that I can see which is the most effective, but I can also see the challenges and the pricing that's on both of the other wasp traps as well, there's no doubt in my mind my recommendation for the best wasp traps of 2021 go to the really simple bottle cap wasp traps from Bee Equipment. I hope you find that video useful. Don't go trapping wasps unnecessarily. Use it as a real backup precaution if your colony is at threat from dying. As always though, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
