Inventor Says “Bye’ To Yellow Jackets

Palo Alto Weekly:

Paul Donahue’s been inventing contraptions since his boyhood in Berkeley, when he and his buddies zoomed down hills in a plywood “tank” — unfortunately before they had figured out how to install brakes.

His latest gizmo — the G’Bye Yellow Jacket Trap — was inspired by a single yellow jacket that pestered Donahue at his Mountain View office for several hours in 1982.

“I finally got him,” Donahue said, still proud.

But he had been bit by the drive to entrap the aggressive, social wasp with a searing sting.

Although he was running a data-export business, Donahue spent hours talking to entomologists worldwide and concocting a yellow-jacket attractant, a formula he finally perfected after five years.

Donahue isn’t giving away his secret recipe, but he did share a single ingredient: Omega-3 fatty acids. Unlike some traps that use fruit juice or soda to snare yellow jackets, Donahue said he relies on their attraction to protein to feed young wasps back in the nest.

He scrapped several designs before coming up with an 8-inch clear plastic cylinder that’s as wide as a roll of wrapping paper with holes in the bottom. Inside sits a small plastic slotted funnel with its tip pointing upward.

Smelling the nectar, the wasps whiz into the holes and find themselves inside the funnel. Trying to get out, they then fly up through the funnel’s tip, only to find themselves trapped in the cylinder. They soon expire from exhaustion, Donahue said.

His trap capitalizes on wasps’ aversion to flying down, Donahue said. Although they could return through the holes they entered, they won’t, he said.

Photo by Norbert von der Groeben.

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