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The unfortunate reality of nice weather is that it means when you open a window to let in a little air, you also run the risk of letting in some decidedly less pleasant guests — bugs. To keep gnats, fruit flies, ants and other pests from completely overrunning your house, you’ll need an indoor insect trap, ideally nontoxic to keep from harming pets or children.
There are a number of different types of insect traps on the market, which are effective for different types of beasties. If you’re concentrating primarily on small insects like fruit flies that proliferate in places like the kitchen, you’ll need something small, lightweight, and ideally subtle enough in design not to look like a gnat mortuary next to the fruit bowl. Other traps are powerful enough to take down larger bugs like larger flies and mosquitoes. Depending on your situation, you may want to pick up both types of traps.
Things to Look for In an Indoor Insect Trap
Here are a few things we took into consideration when putting together our list of best indoor insect traps.
Type of Lure: Insect traps often use fans, UV lights, and heat to attract insects, all of which are effective. In general, we like UV lights, which are non-toxic and relatively quiet. They work best when left on during the night, and turned off during the day, which is also more convenient for daily life. Sometimes, on the other hand, low-tech works just as well, and you might find a simple sticky trap most useful for your immediate needs.
Type of Trap:While many insect traps use electricity to zap the flying insects, these can be noisy, slightly painful to humans when touched, and a little gruesome to be honest if you think too hard about it. We like sticky traps instead, where the insects simply fly into the flypaper and live out their final days in relative peace.
