Check out this video of a hornet nest removal in Louisiana, posted just a few days ago by the removalist.
When i lived in Baltimore, we had a nest outside our front door, under the steps and in the shrub. I managed to kill them off with a can of heavy-duty wasp killer. I thought that was a pretty big nest, but it was just a little village; this is the New York City of hornet nests.
Edit:
And here’s a shorter clip of the whole nest laid out on the ground after removal.
Nnnnope!
Good lord, that’s a massive nest. The swirling horde of furious hornets is my idea of one of the levels of hell.
The constant sleet sound of hornets slamming against the camera is disturbing. That guy better be very, very careful when sealing his bunnysuit.
Yellow jacket nests can be similarly gigantic.
I once had a wasp nest outside my front door. At first it was tolerable, one or two every few minutes would fly in or out. But then much later, it rapidly increased in activity within a few days, and I couldn’t leave my house without having to negotiate around them. One of them chased me down my driveway, and that’s when I contacted an exterminator.
And this was one of my favourite examples of the power of the Internet. I found my local guy online, sent him a message via his site, it apparently SMSd him straight away as literally seconds later he called me back, said he was an hour away, he turned up on time, sprayed the nest with pyrethrum or whatever it’s called, and ten minutes after, they were all dead. 9am = chased by wasp. 10.30am = nest exterminated.
That was nightmarish. As Darren said, the popcorn sound of the yellow jackets pinging off the camera was just…eww.
StG
He should have killed them first. Destroying the nest and letting thousands of angry hornets fly out isn’t helping much, a job only half-done.
actually ive found that a can of artificial snow from xmas does I nice job of killing hive pests … aren’t hornet nests underground tho ?
I saw someone elsewhere say they were yellowjackets. I don’t know one from t’other in the hymenoptera family, but wikipedia suggests that makes them just regular wasps. The nest certainly matches.
Hopefully that shed was far enough away from human habitation that they didn’t need to evacuate the neighborhood before Mr. Exterminator started stirring up the nest.
I also wonder if a good pyrethrin dousing would’ve made the job easier, if less photogenic.
I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but I can’t find it.
Back when I was based in Central America one day I come home to my apartment. When I went into my back bedroom it was strangely dark, despite being a couple hours before sunset. The large 4-plus by 4-plus foot window was almost completely obscured by something.
Once turned on my room lights and got close enough I saw it was a seething mass of bees. They completely blotted out the sun. Fortunately they were on the outside and I was on the inside.
We had been warned that the “killer bees” (properly “Africanized bees”) were making their way north and had been spotted not too far from our installation. We were told that if a swarm was sighted, leave the area briskly and call the base exterminator people to deal with it. I did, they did.
A month or so later I spotted another swarm that had attached itself to the side of a pump house, a roughly 10’ cube of whitewashed cinderblock. This time I stayed around to watch. The exterminator showed up in a bee suit with a Batman utility belt full of cans of spray insecticide. He walked up to the wall-o-bees, opened fire with a can in each hand and the bees fell off in sheets. It looked like peeling thick bark off a cork tree. Layer after layer. He’d empty 2 cans, drop them, draw two more, and continue blasting away. By the end he had a large pile of dead bees at his feet that he snow-shoveled into a trash can. There were probably a few hundred survivors milling randomly and taking off for wherever. The pile at his feet had to be 50K bees.
Pretty cool. But it would have been bad to have been the animal or person they chose to swarm on.
I wonder how long it took that nest to get that big?? And how do you not notice that going on in your shed or whatever, and nuke it before it becomes a huge swarm of angry, stinging creatures?
there are a bunch of different species colloquially referred to as "hornets’ or “yellow jackets.” e.g. German wasps, common wasps, eastern yellowjackets, etc. all of them nest a bit differently.
and all of them are assholes.
This is rural (or at least semi-rural) Louisiana.
For all we know, the property could have been neglected or sitting vacant for an extended period of time. Maybe a new owner just bought it, and got the fright of his or her life upon opening the door to the shed. Or maybe the shed was simply never used, and was far enough from the house that the owners never noticed any unusual number of critters.
Wasp-related story:
When i was much younger, i worked for a couple of summers as a waiter and bartender in a nice country house hotel in the English Lakes District. It was a job where a lot of the staff lived on-site, and for a while i had a room in the hotel itself, rather than in the separate staff quarters. It wasn’t like a guest room; more like the rooms of the staff at Downton Abbey, on the top floor of the building, at the back.
One morning, i found a couple of European wasps in the room. I assumed they had gotten in through an open window, so i got rid of them and forgot about it. The next morning, there was another. And the morning after that, i woke just in time to see one of the little bastards sink its stinger into my bare chest.
After yelling in pain, crushing the attacker in my bare hand, and throwing it with all my strength against the wall, i set about making a closer inspection of the room. I noticed that the opening in the ceiling, leading to the attic, had its cover very slightly askew, leading to a small gap. I assumed that this is where the wasps had got in, so i adjusted it to close the gap.
But i also went to the head groundskeeper/maintenance guy to tell him that there might be a nest up there somewhere. He called in a pest control person, and they found a huge nest up in the roof. Until i raised the alarm, no-one had noticed it, because the wasps had been able to come and go under the eaves, without getting into the main part of the building. It was only the mis-aligned cover in my room that allowed them in, and gave the game away.
The exterminator took care of them in short order.
For your viewing pleasure. super swarm. The phrase NUKE EM FROM ORBIT has never been more appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-qA_0NPVSU
Sorry, can’t agree.
For wasps and hornets, yes; for honey bees, no way. Wasps and hornets are often assholes, but are generally a live-and-let-live sort of creature. And they produce honey!
In fact, there are videos online of beekeepers moving big swarms like this with their bare hands, and hanging around the nests with no shirt on. Like this guy.
That’s what I thought. Holy shit, I’d hate to be within a two-mile radius of that place!
(Actually, I wouldn’t mind. I relish in killing little, horrid beasties. But I’d worry about my dogs.)
It’s a self-sustaining business model.
If he kills all the wasps first, then he only gets paid once. But if he eliminates the nest and leaves most of the wasps alive, he knows he’ll be getting another call in a few weeks or a few months to remove another nest.
Hornets play basketball? And what happened to the child attached to the bookbag?
