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No need to let these flying pests dampen your summer enjoyment or even buy a trap.

Summer is great, but buzzing fruit flies and munching carpenter bees can put a damper on your summertime enjoyment. Although fruit flies can’t do too much in the way of damage, wood-boring carpenter bees can more than wreck your summer. By boring into wood trim, siding, your deck, and outdoor furnishings, they can do hundreds or even thousands of dollars in damage. Given today’s lumber prices, it makes sense to build some simple traps to control these pests.

Fortunately, control measures for both flies and bees are pretty easy. Chances are good you already own the water bottles necessary to make an effective DIY fruit fly trap—they come right out of your recycling bin. And as for catching carpenter bees, all you need are basic power tools, some scrap wood, and bee-trapping containers that also come out of the recycling bin.

Suppose you don’t own much in the way of tools, but you want to get started making some of these traps. As it turns out, constructing fly traps is not only easy, it’s a great way to jump start your DIY skills. Unlike other projects, what’s the worst can happen here? Something turns out wrong, just throw it out and try again with another piece of scrap wood.

Fruit flies are the common flying pest that feeds on sugary and acidic fruits and vegetables. In the worst case, they can burrow in and lay their eggs inside. You can read more about their biology here. The goal of making a fruit fly trap is to entice these insects to their doom with a sweet bait held in a clear container with an inverted funnel entry. The flies are lured in and collect on the walls of the container and eventually die.

As to the fly-attracting mixture you add, that’s up to you. After looking at dozens of recipes on line, even some prepared by entomologists and agricultural experts writing for cooperative extension offices for land grant colleges and universities, the only thing I can say is that any sugary mixture should work. And given how inexpensive these traps are to prepare, you can try different mixtures to see what works best on the pests in your area. In my bottle, I took dashes of apple cider, orange juice, and water and added several drops of dish detergent to reduce the surface tension of the mix, increasing its ability to trap flies. You can find two additional different mixtures here, in this well-prepared video by organic farmer Jagmeet Singh, who, with his wife, owns and operates Daisy Creek Farm, a 20-acre you-pick enterprise where they grow fruits and vegetables—all while keeping flies under control without pesticides.

Here’s a step-by-step look at building a fly trap:

Carpenter bees dig tunnels into wood so that they can lay their eggs. (You can read more about their biology here.) The goal of making a carpenter bee trap is to present some attractive softwood to the bee that has holes already drilled into it. The bee is enticed by the pre-drilled hole and follows into a trapping container, some form of a clear jar, whether that’s glass or plastic.

Roam the internet, and you’ll see some very cute wood traps made to lure carpenter bees. They’re as beautifully made as bird houses and, while we have nothing against these well-built traps, friends and neighbors (including one woodworker) that I spoke with on the topic who regularly trap these bees say your best bet are multiple simple traps rather than one or two nice-looking traps.

The process for building these is straight forward. The simplest form of trap is a jar attached to any block of wood. You take a 1⁄2-inch spade bit and drill the main bee-trapping tunnel in the end of the block. This hole leads directly into the trapping jar. Make this hole deep enough so that the other sloping entry holes will intersect with it. In most cases, that means the hole’s depth has to be at least the mid-point on the block. Next, you clamp the block on its side and drill holes sloping at about a 45-degree angle so that they intersect with the main tunnel hole bored in the end. You’ll feel it the moment that the drill bit breaks through to the first hole you bored. Stop drilling there and move on to the next hole. For a 4 x 4, you can drill sloping holes on all four sides of the block; you can do the same with a 2 x 4, but this can also remove so much wood that the block may split in the process of drilling.

Here’s a step-by-step look at building a carpenter bee trap:

There is one difference between a bee trap built with a jar and one built using a water or seltzer bottle: Traps built with a jar are simpler. You drill your holes in the block, drill a hole in the jar lid, and then use sheet-metal screws to attach the lid to the block. Done. It’s a bit trickier to attach a water bottle. You begin the hole drilling process by using a 1-inch diameter spade bit to make a 1⁄2-inch-deep hole in the end of the block. In the center of this hole, you drill the 1⁄2-inch-diameter hole that forms the main tunnel, to which the sloping holes will connect. Some bottle caps are exactly 1 inch in diameter and will fit snugly into the larger hole you drilled. With other bottles, the top of the bottle itself is 1 inch in diameter. You remove the bottle cap and twist the bottle into the hole. If you use the cap to mount the bottle, you have to drill out the center of the cap. Glue the cap, or the bottle itself, into its hole using Super Glue. In some cases, you may find that the top of the bottle itself twists into the 1-inch hole so firmly, you don’t need glue to fasten the bottle to the block.

I even made one bee trap using a small scrap of 3⁄4-inch-thick cedar. I designed it as an outrigger, for lack of a better description, so that it can be nailed or screwed right to the side of a barn, outbuilding, or fastened to a stair stringer. The bottle hangs below the block.

And there you have it. Simple DIY traps to keep you and your home bug-free.