A really weird question here, but is there any reason why scotch tape won’t stick to a peanut. I was trying to set a mouse trap and one recommendation was peanut butter. I didn’t have any of that, but thought a peanut might work. Obviously I didn’t want to just set it on the spring lever so I thought I’d scotch tape it to the lever with half exposed. Well scotch tape (I was using Scotch brand magic tape) simply will not stick to a shelled peanut. I suspect regular Scotch tape is stickier, and that Duck tape is stickier still, but what gives.
And yes I tested the tape. It was oldish, but it certainly still stuck to my finger and to paper. Nor was there any powdery residue on the peanut itself.
Just a WAG, but there’s such a thing as peanut oil, and I imagine that shelled peanuts must have some amount of it on the surface.
Back in the day when I did battle with mousies, I found peanut butter to be an excellent bait. It sticks to the trap trigger very well so they can’t just abscond with it like they might with a piece of cheese, and the aroma seems to last a long time. Get thee some peanut butter! The smallest, cheapest jar you can find – the mousies don’t care!
Mr.Wrekker has to use big wire to tie bait on his giant rat traps in the barn. He swears they can untwist most any thing.
He also uses pieces of dog treat rawhide for the bait. They will tear anything else off.
Hell, they’ll eat the traps after they are snapped. Whether their brother rat is trapped is no matter. He’s dessert.
Put a dab of cooking oil on a paper towel and then spread the thinnest possible layer on a plate or your finger. You’ll find almost no adhesive will stick to that, and certainly not Scotch tape’s.
There’s a reason the prep instructions for gluing (or painting, or caulking, or …) damn near any item with damn near any goop will mention something like “Ensure the surfaces are clean and oil-free”.
There is no such thing as the alchemists goal of The Universal Solvent (thank goodness), but there is something close to The Universal Antistick. And it’s nearly any type of oil.
I learned from experience that the mice will just lick the peanut butter off the trap without triggering it. When I mentioned that to an Orkin guy I know, he told me to take a Snickers Bar, or something else sticky like that, and stick it on the lever so they have to put more effort (and use their front feet) to pull it off.
If you really want to use tape, just run the tape all the way around the lever and peanut. You don’t need to worry about cleaning anything if the tape just goes all the way around and sticks back to itself.
If you lightly crush a peanut on newsprint and let it sit for a couple hours, it will leave an oily slick. It’s part of why peanuts are so tasty and useful. That same oil makes them crumble pretty quickly so even a mechanical technique like twist tie or wedging (see below) won’t last long. A loop of tape might actually not be terrible in forming a sling but then the enticing peanut surface is covered.
We had mice on and off growing up and remember coming to a very similar conclusion, both components and approach. Snickers were usually treasured Halloween loot and, even if I’d have thought of it back then, too good for mice. But a peanut or chocolate chip lodged into the trigger was very effective because, like you said, they gotta tug at it. Y’know, studying rodent bait, a very normal and healthy past time for a kid, lol.
I use a little bit of chocolate to bait mouse traps. I can sort of jam the chocolate into the trigger, and it’s a rigid enough connection that when they nibble at the chocolate it wiggles the lever. I’ve had excellent luck using chocolate at bait.
My Daddy would painstakingly tie, with thread, pieces of bacon rind.
Tiny pieces. He was dealing with tiny grey house mousies. Any thing bigger would frighten them away. Sez he.
I tried to tell him get the biggest traps, put on the biggest wedge of cheese. The ripe/smelly kind. The mousies will run to the hills.
Bing, bang, boom. No mice. No mo’
It worked for me in the old former house. But I was particular about setting the trigger to be super sensitive. It’s true that the little rodents are clever and very quick, but there’s nothing better than old-fashioned spring traps set to a hair-trigger threshold. And peanut butter is very attractive to them!
Personally, I like these ones. Even for mice, I get the big rat trap version as the spring is stronger and more likely to actually do what it’s meant to do. I also like that I can set/reset them by stepping on the back and I can empty them just as easily. I also find that they’re a lot easier to bait. They have a little ‘bait cup’. It’s removable but I find it easier to just leave it in and step on the back of the trap while I push a piece of a snickers bar into the the little cup.
And with a trap like this, where the entire ‘floor’ is a trigger, as soon as they try to pull something out of the bait cup, as opposed to being able to lick it, they can’t help but trigger it.
Luckily the one time these big rat traps didn’t work for me it turned out it wasn’t an unusually large rat (ROUS joke here) in my garage, but a opossum. I’m not sure what I wouldn’t have done with a probably-not-dead opossum, stuck on a rat trap in my garage.
In that case, a trail of dog food on a 2x4 leading up to the top of a garbage can actually worked within 10 minutes of setting it up.
I’m not buying the oil theory. The oil is mostly confined to the inside of the shell. I think the problem is the texture of the shell. Only the ridges are exposed to the tape.
My husband has caught the wild life, occasionally.
They steal his traps.
In his usual cuckoo brainy-ness,
He wired some to structure in the barn, til he got faced with a huge raccoon with a stuck foot. And a bad attitude!
That was a giant kerfuffle. Believe me.
