Improved Vegas Cockroach Trap - from peanut butter jar

Article By Shorty


Well, I had some cockroaches invade my house. I would use chemicals, but I have kids and 2 great danes and am afriad the chemicals will hurt them. So I am trying to find ways to kill the cockroaches without using nasty chemicals.

For starters, I bought 50 lbs of diatomaceous earth (DE powder) from the feed store. The poweder is small crushed up shells and the way it supposedly works is the wax on the outside of insects gets scratched off by the powder, and they dehydrate. This is not the type that goes into your swimming pool - it is the food grade powder that people feed to farm animals to kill parasites. Since it is OK to injest by mamals, I dusted the daylights out of everything around the outside of my house, and inside I dusted behind all the furniture, under stuff, in cracks etc. At home improvement stores, it costs about $8 for a 3 pound bag. The 50 lb bag I got at the feed store was only $30. For a duster, I use an empty squirt bottle as a duster, and dusted EVERYTHING The dusting seems to have reduced the population a bit, but I still have some crawling around so I set about to make some traps for them. I made a minnow trap from a soda bottle which works well, so figured I'd give it a try for catching cockroaches.



I wanted this trap to be an upright trap the roaches drop into. I noticed that sometimes roaches would crawl into my stainless steel dog bowls, and not be able to climb out. They don't seem to be able to climb smooth surfaces very well. I also saw on the internet a trap called a Vegas Roach Trap, which is basically a glass jar tilted against a wall.

I have a lot of plastic peanut butter jars laying around, so using that as the housing for the trap. For the funnel, I cut a hole in the lid. Here I am marking the lid, the bottom of my water glass is the right size to mark where the hole goes.




Using the dremel to cut the hole in the lid.



Mark it - want a little bit bigger than the hole.



To glue the funnel to the lid, I use bathtub caulk. I really like this stuff, because it does a good job of sticking plastics together and is a lot cheaper than plumbers goop (or marine goop). The goop holds better, but the caulk holds good enough.




Starting off with 3 of them.





Now here is an interesting problem, my danes will knock over and chew at anything, so I needed something to protect the trap. I had some 4" pvc pipe laying around, and made a sort of beer cozie.




Since I am attaching these to the wall, the roaches should be able to climb up the wall and then fall in. But just incase, I glued some fabric to the back side so they will have an easy time getting up the sides.



Here we go, screwed to the wall and ready to catch some roaches.



Look at that.



Got one.

I guess a large part of the trap's effectiveness will be the baits. I started with a little beer and a piece of bread. I read they like yeast, coffee grounds, sugar, and cockroach guts.

UPDATE
The traps work really well !! So well infact that I wiped out the population of invaders that were in my house. A couple of issues though, the first bait I tried wasn't as good, as when I switched over to coffee grounds. When setting up a trap, I put in 3 teaspoons of used coffee grounds and about an inch of water. That bait works great.

After a couple of weeks of the above bait, the jar will get moldy and nasty. Nice thing the configuration I am using, I just unscrew the funnel lid and throw away the old jar. Then put the funnel lid on a new jar, load up with coffee and back to catching more roaches.