Comment by itsanaccount
8 days ago
deer and horse flies are fundamentally different. a horse fly can be caught by a chemical attractant, think the "pop" traps. Which you can scale to a 5 gallon bucket no problem.
A deer fly goes after movement and the color blue, so your traps tend to be sticky traps, like a lowes bucket coated in tanglefoot. but you can't feed them to fish, chickens and they're a pain to clean.
I've been looking for someone to scale up some kind of fan trap for deer flies, like think a bigger version of the Katchy UV traps, but so far nobody has done anything. A fellow had a good example of using blue nitrile gloves blown up and coated in tanglefoot on a stick but while cheap, still messy.
Here's a thought -- there are instructions in various places for mosquito fan traps using a box or other sturdy fan plus mesh on one side.
Do that, but paint the fan (with blades) blue. If more movement is needed, you could probably do something pretty simple with a plastic plate painted blue and hung about a foot from the fan intake.
Cleanup isn't great, but it's better than sticky traps. Spray the mesh down with a 50:50 water:alcohol solution as needed to kill live flies in the trap before dumping.
In my parts, I've seen people put blue solo cups wrapped in glue/tape upside down on their lawnmowers or biking helmets as they're moving around.