So if I want to preserve some fresh deer meat scraps with sodium benzoate can the coyotes smell or taste the sodium benzoate?

Can you taste any preservatives in the foods that you eat? I would guess not unless over used.

S.B. is actually very sweet of what I have tasted over the years

is there any kind of smell associated to the sodium benzoate while preserving the fresh venison ?

I doubt there is much a coyote can not smell. If you make a set and nothing happens for a week, if you check it with binoculars, I doubt a coyote finding it on the 7th day can tell you were there. I bet that coyote can smell the trap, can smell the cable stake, can smell that the dirt was disturbed. Most coyotes don't survive that encounter and learn it is dangerous.

IN MY OPINION ( how would you ever know as a certainty?) those faint background smells make very few nervous enough to turn and leave if everything else they smell is interesting.

Coyotes encounter a multitude of smells every day. For an animal they are smart but I dont think they can actually interpret a lot of smells. They recognize food as food and pee as pee, but when they smell your trap its the same smell as the barb wire fence they just crawled under.

Since were talking about coyotes I am sure a small minority will spook off SB. Some are just unbelievably timid the day they are born. Its why there are coyotes in county's with USDA and County predator men working year round with gitters, shooting from planes, and denning.

You can't catch em all and SB is VERY effective

If you have a spooky one you need to catch, a real good bait is the stomach contents of one you did. They stash food by puking into a hole and burying it. Got no qualms about stealing from each other.

Very good post Danny. That line of thinking makes sense to me.

Maybe I'm wrong but I'm thinking that most foods have other ingredients that would more than likely overpower the preservative taste. Kinda like a commercial bait with multiple ingredients added versus a natural bait.
When you say sweet, are you talking natural sugar sweet or artificial sweet??

According to my taste it is sugar sweet. I dislike artificial sweeteners in their initial taste and their after taste as well.

That sounds good Bob thanks. I'm thinking sugar is the cheapest sweetener on the market. Are there different grades of sb?

I watched one of Robert Waddells demonstrators and he said the reason that he uses fresh bait versus a commercial bait is because everyone else is using commercial bait . As far as I know most all commercial bait has sodium benzoate or some other preservative in it . Robert said it makes no difference wether he is in a contest or working a ranch that’s been fur trapped all winter he does not want his dirt hole to smell anything like someone else’s. I tried the fresh venison with salt as a preservative and it worked great as far as the coyotes are concerned. The only problem is it will mold , and mold is not a great attractor. Now your looking at adding another ingredient to stop mold and I’m sure it’s also used in most commercial baits . In my opinion the only way to use fresh bait is to freeze it and use the chunks you can chip out or use wax paper between layers.
Hope this helped.
Don

Thanks GB yes that info does help. It was probably brought up in the 1000 coyote thread but i missed the part about using fresh bait only because of the competition. I guess I got off track and was thinking his fresh bait was working better than a commercial bait.
I trap in a climate that gets warm enough the flies would have a fresh bait turned into a maggot infested mess in no time. I have a tendency to over think things some times. This might be one of those times. Lol
I don't have to worry about competition where I trap so I think I'd be smart to stick with what works.

Flys are not a problem here during our trapping season. Maybe some of the southern guys will have an answer for you . My next question would be , does the sodium benzoate deter flys ?

golf ball flys will still get on the bait but they either dont lay eggs or the eggs wont hatch. im not sure which. it has to be in the meat for 2-3 weeks before the flys get to it for the bait to be protected from maggots

I have had some preserved bait product get maggots in them over the years. Most were found dead others were still crawling around by the time I found the breach.

I had been given a demisted beetle colony years ago by a local fella that did some taxidermy work on the side. Not a big colony but large enough for my private use.

I got the beetles in the winter so I really didn't have much meat left from trapping at that time to feed them. I got the idea that I would feed them some of our XXX Matrix meat bait as I had a lot of it on hand. They found that aged cat meat to their liking it seemed.

A couple of weeks went by and I figured it was time I put some more meat into their container as I monitored how much meat was left every week. At this feeding time I noticed there wasn't any movement in the colony medium that they were living in. I moved all the material around and realized my beetles were all dead.

I thought about this situation for a while and came up with the theory that the preservatives Sodium Benzoate and Methyl Paraben must have been the toxicant that killed them all. At least that was what I blamed the fatalities upon.