Indoor Gnats Are No Match For This Garlic Butter TikTok Hack

One of the most frustrating things about warmer weather is all the tiny bugs that swarm around, especially if they get inside your home. It's often hard to know where they came from or how they got in, be it your drains or your windows or your vents. More importantly, it's hard to know how to get rid of them. The trick to keeping pesky gnats at bay, according to one helpful TikTok hack, is apparently garlic butter.

The next time you order a pizza, ask for extra garlic butter. The small, portable containers they come in are the perfect size to set around wherever gnats are found. The garlic butter's delectable aroma is irresistible to the gnats, and its greasy consistency is something they can't free themselves from. It's a perfect self-contained gnat trap, so much so that if you set them out at night and return to them the next morning, dozens of gnats will have perished in their buttery depths.

Gnats are drawn to organic scents and decomposing materials, which is why they often congregate around overripe fruits and trash cans. To build a trap for them, you're generally advised to set something sweet or rancid out as bait that the gnats will then fall into and be unable to escape. This is essentially how the garlic butter trap works, too.

Technically, garlic is a vegetable. Therefore its scent, while often associated by people with fully prepared foods, is actually an organic aroma that's just as attractive to gnats as bananas or hamburgers. Furthermore, the butter is warm and moist — two attributes that gnats love. What makes the garlic butter such an ingenious trap, however, is the butter itself. Oftentimes DIY insect traps recommend adding a drop of dish soap to whatever other liquid is used because it breaks the surface tension enough for the gnats to fall below the surface. As butter is naturally a fat, its liquid form doesn't allow the gnats to skate on top. Neither can they fly away because the grease sticks to their legs and wings, weighing them down. It's a foolproof solution to a pesky problem.