Pick the Right Traps

Most of the fly traps sold are for House Flies and will not even draw a glance from a Biting Stable Fly. You can put up armfuls of House Fly Traps and your animals will still be eaten up by Biting Stable Flies. House Flies are attracted to food scents and mating scents as well as visual cues. The Stable Fly ignores those scents and is looking for a blood meal. So dark objects that have heat waves coming off them (like your horse) is what attracts them.

For House Fly Traps there are two general types; Stinky and Sticky. The best Odor Traps use a combination of attractants that appeal to the two irresistible urges of flies; food and sex. Most commercial House Fly Traps use various acids added to water as the food smell lure, while homemade traps use a variety of concoctions generally based on yeast, molassas or other stinky, sugary food material. The StarBar® Traps we recommend use a feeding stimulant in combination with a sex pheromone, so you get flies no matter what mood they're in. With better attractants the difference in fly catching performance can be dramatic, sometimes 4-20X better.

Sticky Traps attract flies by visual cues and sometimes just pure dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time when a fly wants to rest. (You can vastly improve that luck by putting these traps in the right place, see below). The visual cues are the correct shapes and color. Yellow always seems to be in fashion if you're a fly. A bright, flat, well-defined, reasonably stable surface is what House Flies prefer. The StarBar® EZ Trap® has all of these characteristics and is far more effective than ill defined, fluttering sticky coils. If you have a big barn with many animals the mounted roll up reels might be the easiest, most effective solution (we don't offer these) but you can’t rinse those off and reuse them like the EZ Trap.