Yellow jacket wasp traps are popular because so many people are annoyed by their in-your-face visits to picnics, honeybee yards, and bird feeders.
The most convenient control methods are disposable traps like Rescue (East of the Rockies) non-toxic all-in-one lure traps.
Commercially produced and sold wasp/hornet traps have to be sized right for marketing, storage, shipping and many other factors which may reduce and limit more effective designs.
It's fun to test and investigate which bait will attract wasps at different times of the year. It's also entertaining to devise large trap systems that exploit natural wasp behavior.
Wasps will investigate every tiny hole and opening in a structure.
By providing a tiny hole in a box that is dark inside, we have the opportunity to draw them in with food-related scents.
Once inside, they naturally will follow the light and are prone to enter clear or translucent bottles with a central riser or cone shape.
Once the optimum entry hole size and placement is identified, the next thing is cutting a standardized hole for the exit/trap entry.
After all of that is worked out, a more permanent bottomless box can be constructed from wood, metal, plastic etc. The material must be absolutely opaque in order to create that light/dark contrast.
I found the peanut-butter pretzel container to be the best "collector" as the plastic is stronger and it has a wide mouth lid through which I drilled a 2" diameter hole for the vertical riser which was made by cutting the top/bottom off of a 16 oz clear plastic bottle, then overlapping the plastic forming a cylinder that perfectly matched the 2" hole in the dark brown threaded lid. I used a soldering iron to "spot-weld" the plastic together simply by partially melting into both layers.
Cardboard for practice, wood for the final design is my preference.
The yellow-jackets were entering the system with great regularity.
So, I thought it would be something fun to share with KZfaqrs.
After the bottles have enough wasps in them, simply drop them into a plastic bucket of hot tap water and they are finished. Clean and replace the bottle, or simply install the new one. No need to wash before using a soda bottle, that residue also attracts yellow jackets.