Pretty Black Girl is a great mouse catcher! She usually likes to eat the head, and leaves the remainder on our steps. Why the heck she does this, we have no idea. It’s almost as though she’s leaving some sort of offering.
Regarding this…
Those sound like what we call Japanese Hornets. Around here, they have a reputation for being almost deadly. They can sting repeatedly, each shot packing one hell of a wollop. The victim will bloat up like a Macy’s parade balloon. That’s the legend, anyway. I keep my distance from them.
The biggest nasty buggy critters I’ve seen are carpenter bees-bigger than bumble with a more elongated abdomen. They don’t care about plants-eating holes in wood is what they like. You can also recognize them from their little tool belts and the rude comments made to passing female bees. 
The big fad in the pest control product business in the last two years has been an aerosol that does not use pyrethrins (the standard wasp/bee/fly/mosquito killer) but mint oil. Since it is not mixed in the typical petroleum distillate, you might check to see whether it is safer on (less likely to stain) wood.
I generally do not bother to kill wasps, so I still have my three-year-old can of pyrethrins spray and have not yet checked out the new stuff. I usually only have to knock down one nest a year and I try to do it before June so that I am only killing the first queen and not wiping out an established colony. (This year I kept removing a rather mild hornet from inside the top of our mailbox, but she insisted on coming back to rebuild at the same spot. I knew that she and the postal lady were going to square off in a couple of weeks and I could not get her to find a better location, so I spritzed her, being careful to not get any spray on our jumping spider at the back of the box.)
As noted earlier, if you identify the location of the nest, they are easy to eliminate. Just take a light out after dark and continually spray into the nest opening until they stop coming out. They will not attack once it is dark, even if the nest is under attack. (And the spray cans are usually good for 15’, so you don’t have to stand next to the nest to test my claim.)
Not so. Ever since the mite infestation destroyed most of the honey bees, wasps are keeping alive the fruit industry in much of this country, pollinating the blossoms so that we continue to produce fruit. Some other flowering crops (not hybrids) are also being maintained by the wasps.
I found some natural solutions that are very effective.
Killing With Liquid Soap
Get a good quantity of dish washing liquid in a hose-end sprayer
Let the water going until the suds starts.
Hit the nest from as far away as you can, while still maintaining a strong flow of spray.
Do this in the evening a couple of days in a row, after all the wasps have returned home for the night.
Don’t forget to wear long pants and sleeves clothing, especially if you have low water pressure.
You can know more here