My wife went out the front of the house today to cut back some ivy that grows along our front path. Not long after, i heard the front door slam and saw her in the entranceway waving her hands around madly. Turns out she disturbed a wasp nest, and a few of the little bastards made it inside on her clothes. Luckily, it’s a cool day and they seemed a bit lethargic; she didn’t get stung. We dispatched the intruders easily enough.
But now there’s a garbage bag full of garden waste sitting on our front path, and there are dozens of wasps flying angrily around it. They way they are congregating around the bag, i can only assume she inadvertently pulled part or all of their nest into the bag. The location of the bag makes it impossible for us to enter or leave the house by the front path. We can go out onto the porch and cross to the neighbor’s porch, and leave via their path, but that’s not a good long-term solution.
What’s the best way to deal with this? Are the wasps likely to quiet down later? Should i buy some poison spray, wait until they settle down, and then blast them? Any advice most welcome.
By the way, i think we’re dealing with the Common Wasp here.
I took a couple of pictures (one is rather out of focus) of one of the intruders before killing it. Here are the pics:
That’s what i would do. In painting older homes, I often run across nets, old and new. The stuff with the jet stream of spray is what I use. Even at that, I stll sometimes get stung. (Little fuckers)
Don’t get too overconfident, tho. I once thought I had eliminated a certain group of under the soffit wasps, only to find that the entier house was infested with what was quite possibly thousands of the things. I found out quite by accident, thinking that the humming siding was indiacting an electrical problem or something. The howowner had to stay in a hotel for a few days while his exterminator dealt with the problem.
So, be careful, eyes open and all that jazz, but the jet stream spray is usually a good fix.
Or she may have inadvertently squashed one, whether dead or alive, and stuck it into the bag with the yard waste. The way I understand it, these kinds of wasps react strongly to chemical cues, which include one of their brethren (sistren?) either stinging somebody or getting smushed. Seems to me there was a thread about this within the last month, where somebody got stung and then was immediately surrounded by a cloud of the fuckers. So the wasps may be congregating around the smell of a dead comrade, looking for vengeance.
I got some Raid Wasp and Hornet Killer, and fired at the opening of the bag from a safe distance. Any critters in that bag had no chance. I then saw some wasps hovering a few feet away, near the base of our front steps under the azalea bush. It looked like that might be an entryway of some sort, and i thought it might be where the nest was, so i directed a healthy spray of the poison down there as well.
The directions on the can said to leave it for 24 hours before attempting to remove the nest, so that any returning wasps will also be killed. I’ll go out in the morning and investigate, and tie up the bag. Now that it’s starting to get colder, any remaining wasp without a nest to go back to is probably going to die pretty quickly anyway.
I’m just glad we didn’t come across it a month ago. I we had disturbed it during the warm weather, someone might have got badly stung.
