Good Bait For Mouse Traps: Get the MEGA LIST Here!

There is no shortage for good bait for mouse traps, only good LISTS of mouse bait. Here I have collected the top choices for mouse and rat bait in all situations.

This is the best food bait intended to lure mice and rats into traps. Heed the advice for best success in baiting traps for mice!

DON’T MISS Pantry Passion’s Complete Article List for Mouse & Rat Prevention!

Table of Contents

• What’s a Good Mouse Bait?
  • What Bait Doesn’t Work
• Food to Attract Mice: Candy
• Mouse Food For Traps, Do Mice Eat Meat?
• Food to Lure Mice: Peanut Butter Bait Combos
• What Are Mouse Bait Balls?
  • Natural Repellent Balls
  • Choosing the Right Type
• Best Tips to Apply Bait to Mouse Traps
  • Mouse Trap Bait Gone, No Mouse
• Best Bait for Bucket Mouse Traps
• Use the Right Bait for the Right Mouse
• Mouse Bait Spreaders
• Final Thoughts

What’s a Good Mouse Bait?

A good mouse bait is the one that works for you! Don’t get discouraged when you try something off of my mega mouse bait list and it won’t attract mice. For one thing, you need the right bait for the right type of mouse (see the last section).

It’s a common understanding among us farm folk that mice can grow accustomed to the same bait, or associate it with death. Mice and rats are smart that way. For example, with commercial rat poison, it’s recommended to switch out brands to keep rodents attracted to the bait.

Mice might not take the bait because they have so much food already, like a nearby cornfield. They may just be looking for a warm place to stay to have a litter of babies.

In this Youtube video, the famous Shawn Woods created a fascinating test on what foods that mice and rats like the best. Surprisingly, mice took cat food, rats did not.

What Bait Doesn’t Work

Cheese is considered the iconic bait for mouse traps., but not always the best choice. According to Victor Pest, “rodents are primarily nut and seed eaters” and Miche Pest Control comments that mice don’t really like dairy. Nut butters will be a favorite!

Food to Attract Mice: Candy

Mice love chocolate; pair it with nuts and it’s irresistible to them! Many candy bars on the market will offer this primo combination. Pros recommend softening hard chocolate (like Tootsie Rolls) first and then when you set it on the trap, it will harden. Just a few chews of your mouth, or a zap in the microwave, and it will be pliable enough to re-harden around the mouse trip plate.

In the Shawn Woods video (famous mouse videos on Youtube) he recommends the hard chocolate candy in mouse or rat traps. It forces the rodents to work hard to get it. The more time they spend with the bait, the more likely the trap will be snapped. Mice and rats can lick bait off without snapping a trap.

Try these fan favorite candy bars for baiting mouse and rat traps:

• Snickers
• Tootsie rolls
• Bit-O-Honey
• Caramel
• Peanut M&Ms
• Gummy bears
• Kit Kat Bars
• Reese’s peanut butter
• Marathon bar
• Crushed hard candy

Mouse Food For Traps, Do Mice Eat Meat?

There is plenty from your kitchen pantry you can use to feed mice. On the list you will notice baloney, Slim Jims, and beef jerky (the same thing). This list is tried and true – yes mice eat meat. However, when given the choice, they prefer nuts and seeds.

Did you know that mice are cannibals? It’s been proven, but primarily in times of starvation, according to Orkin. So yes again, mice eat meat.

Any one of us would have one of these food choices for bait below in our kitchens:

• Peanut butter, all natural peanut butter, or use the oil from cheap peanut butter that separates
• Use “peanut oil” from an eye dropper to bait all my traps (no ants, no bugs!)
• Almond-cashew butter
• Corn syrup, pancake syrup, honey, agave syrup
• Baloney, Slim Jims, beef jerky
• Raisin
• Bacon grease
• Pretzels
• Popcorn kernel placed on honey
• Marshmallow
• Cat food/dog food
• Sunflower seeds
• Bird seed mix (would have to mix with something sticky to hold it together)
• Bread, take bit of bread and dampen enough to soften. Put it around and down into the pan of snap trap. It will dry and harden in an hour
• Mix flour and water into a paste and let it dry on trap
• Mashed potato flakes (consider butter-flavored) + strategically-placed bucket style trap with water (the mice seek water after ingesting the flakes). Mashed potato flakes rehydrated and expanded causing mouse death. 
  

Food to Lure Mice: Peanut Butter Bait Combos

• PB on EVERYTHING
• PB on dried kernel of corn
• PB mixed with powder sugar
• PB on Slim Jim (but will attract cockroaches)
• PB on marshmallow
• PB smeared on bread
• PB with raisin stuck in
• PB mix poison into
• PB or almond-cashew butter with pistachio nut placed into it
• PB mixed into chunk of cotton ball (sticks to their tongue and they trip the trap)

What Are Mouse Bait Balls?

Mouse bait balls are compact, round formulations designed to attract and kill mice. They come in a few different types, depending on their purpose—either poisonous bait or natural repellents.

Some people form ingredients into rat bait balls or mouse bait balls by adding a sticky food to it. Handling poison in this type of time-invested activity doesn’t sound like a smart idea. It’s also critical to prevent accidental exposure to pets or children. Use really depends on your situation.

For homemade mouse food recipes for killing mice, refer to the Killing Mice article.

Natural Repellent Balls

These are non-lethal and aim to drive mice away using strong scents. They often include:

• Peppermint oil or cinnamon oil
• Plant-based ingredients
• Safe for use around pets and kids

Have your pick of any many types of rodent repellent balls on Amazon, from cedar balls, to peppermint oil soaked ones.

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Choosing the Right Type

Type	Purpose	Safe for Pets?	Effective Indoors?	Effective Outdoors?
Poisonous bait balls	Kill mice	❌ No	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Natural repellent balls	Repel mice	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	✅ Yes

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If you’re dealing with an infestation, poison bait balls might be more effective—but they require careful handling. If you’re just trying to keep mice out of a space, natural repellent balls are a safer, low-maintenance option.

Similar to mouse bait balls, some people will put ingredients into packets. This might be an easier method to slip them into hard-to-reach places. You can take any of the food mentioned and put into a napkin forming a pocket or aluminum foil. Some people might even slip into an empty toilet roll cardboard tube for easier handling.

Best Tips to Apply Bait to Mouse Traps

These household tools can easily handle the job of smearing bait onto traps. Remember – glove up first. You never want the scent of your skin to absorb into a mouse trap. Mice will avoid it!

Note the extra tricks to make the mouse work for the bait. The longer he has to struggle with it, the greater chance the trap will be snapped.

• Q-tip
• Toothpick
• Bamboo skewer
• Put smooth PB into a Ziplock bag, snip off tiny corner and squeeze into hole gap of mouse plate.
• Hot glue the bait, such as almonds, cat food, dog food, sunflower (for almond, rough up bottom so it holds blue better, then scrape a bit off the top to open up the odor of the nut to the mice.
• Attach a cotton string, especially, loop through 2-3 times and tie with square knot. embedded with bait (like peanut butter)
• Roll PB inside of toilet paper, mice love to shred the paper.

Mouse Trap Bait Gone, No Mouse

A professional exterminator gave this advice on a forum:

If bait on a snap trap is gone and the trap is still set, insects such as ants or roaches ate it. If you caught a mouse and the bait is gone, there is another mouse.”

That is good information, but not the whole story. There could be a number of reasons why the bait is gone. I’ll pick that up in my article on mouse trap strategies.

Best Bait for Bucket Mouse Traps

Roller-style mouse trap buckets have a strong fan following. Usually, a stick leads up to the bucket with a “spinner” on it – mice can’t maintain their balance and fall into a substance of choice in the bucket – and never get out.

It’s common to dot the stick with bait, or scatter grains leading to the sticks. Folks have reported success using the following on the stick or immediate vicinity to lure to the bucket’s top:

• Peanut oil
• Shelled sunflower seeds, , peanut shells, barley, etc.
• Adding peanut shells or sunflower seeds to the top of the water (in the bucket) giving the impression that bucket is full of seeds.

Comment from Youtube video: “I use “peanut oil” from an eye dropper to bait all my traps. No ants eating all the bait and no bugs. In fact, I had traps that I haven’t set out in over a year old and still caught mice with them with NO MORE PEANUT OIL BAIT APPLIED! They smell what’s left of the oil ad BANG. Got ’em. Again with just peanut oil. I was catching as many as 11 mice in one night. I also, put these traps outside because I don’t want the mice inside. I get ’em when their on their way in.“

The following isn’t bait, but just some suggestions on what to put IN the bucket itself.

• RV/marine is non-toxic; safe for cats and dogs.
• Swimming pool antifreeze (non-toxic).
• windshield wiper fluid.
• leftover oil from frying chickens or salad oil.
• Water, with 1/8 cup of oil on top.
• Salt or rock salt, the freeze point depends on how much salt you add to it.
• Automotive antifreeze smells like a sweet treat.
• Add a few drops of Dawn dish soap helps fur get water logged, someone else described it as “breaking the surface tension” and rodents will sink to bottom.

A commenter on this Youtube video offered their mouse trap bucket variation: “Instead of water, I use laundry bleach. Then I put a thin–about 3/16 inch–layer of glycerin on top. The glycerin blocks the bleach odor and pretty much stops evaporation. I’ve been able to leave this version “working” all winter long in a “closed-for-the-season” cabin with satisfactory results. When the mice fall in, they cannot get back to the surface because they are trapped under the glycerin. For long-term placements, the odor of dead mice is not an issue. The bleach kills most of the associated bacteria, thereby reducing the amount of decomposition gas. The gas that does form is captured under the glycerin.”

Another added, “I actually just put two inches of barley in the pail & the stick they can’t resist climbing in clean plastic they can’t climb back out. Set it by a bench or seat in your RV & they go for the barley first. They die & dry up they need water to live, eating the dry grain just helps them die faster.”

Use the Right Bait for the Right Mouse

There are two types of mice: house mice and what I call “country” mice. The country mice are the ones with the overly-large eyes. Country mice are constantly looking for fluffy things to build nests from. 

Country mice aka field mice love fluffy stuff for nests will also be attracted to “fluff” left on a traditional snap trap. This could be a bit of a cotton ball, quilt or toy stuffing, or cotton string.

If no mouse is seeming to go for your bait, then you might have a field mouse on your hands. Put a little fluff on a traditional snap trap and you might be surprised.

Let this be a lesson to you: clean up and put away papers! If there is a stuffed animal with a torn seam, those darn mice will find it! Mice are attracted to stuffing from toy stuffed animals. I was horrified to find that a bed pillow that was stored on the floor was ransacked for it’s stuffing by a mouse.

Mouse Bait Spreaders

Anyone hear of mouse bait spreaders? Neither did I. Based on the videos I came up with, these are an Australian thing where the experience epic mouse infestations.

Final Thoughts

Bottom line, when it comes to mouse and rat bait, you have options. Don’t fall into outdated mouse bait advice of cheese, cheese, cheese. There’s a whole plethora of mouse bait food possibilities!

Hopefully, you leave more informed with a better understanding of strategy. Sometimes it’s the type of mouse you’re dealing with, or knowing when the critters are turning up their noses to your bait of choice.

Good luck!