And people wonder how I could possibly spend so much time on “that stupid message board.” Thanks, galt. This is becoming quite a saga, I’ll be sad to see it over.
And people wonder how I could possibly spend so much time on “that stupid message board.” Thanks, galt. This is becoming quite a saga, I’ll be sad to see it over.
I tryed the same plan as yesterday. This time the bug bomb worked. The nest got pretty foamed up and I could see a few hornets drop out. I took a stick and crushed the nest, it fell to the ground and I crushed it some more then walked through my gate
Congratulations!
I’m interested to know the details of the insect vermin you have destroyed, k2dave; you referred to them as Hornets, but it sounds more like yellowjackets or something similar (not that they are any nicer to deal with); I had hornets in my garden (I live in the UK) last summer and they damn near frightened me to death; they were (like the insect mkmiller99 describes) about the size of my thumb and very active and agressive*.
Could you describe one of them for us?
[sup]I’m sorry entomologists, but bitter experience means that I simply refuse* to believe that hornets and wasps are benign[/sup]
Hornets nests are very easy to distinguish as they form a paper ball with a single hole in the bottom, while yellow jackets live underground.
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/Urban/hornnest.htm
dirty1’s link shows almost exactly what the hive looked like. So much so that I had to take a closer look to make sure it wasn’t the one I destroyed. The nest was pretty much a paper ball w/ some honeycome structure inside. If you need or want further info I will be glad to share.
Are you sure this is always the case; we have them over here in the UK (-same species - Vespula Vulgaris - they are just known as ‘wasps’ here) and they will nest anywhere that is dry and undisturbed, often this will be underground in a vacated rabbit hole or similar, but they are frequently found nesting in sheds, attics and hedges and hollow trees too.
What did the actual insects look like k2dave?
Oh and just to back up my seemingly unreasonable statement above about wasps being vicious bastards; my young son was stung on the back of the leg by one this afternoon; there was no provocation, it just landed on him and stung him. Bloody insects.
** Mangetout ** , I’ve been stung without provaction too. In the fall they start getting agressive and sting without reason - or so it seems. Maybe I was too close to the nest, however I didn’t now of any nests in the vicinity. Anyway, I heard of another way to kill yellow jackets, the ground nesters. First, find all the entrance/exit holes to the nest. Then get some glass bowls and put them over the holes. The light shines in and doesn’t alarm them (so hopefully they won’t swarm out and get ya) but they are trapped and will die.
kind of like this
http://www.costumedcharacters.com/bee.jpg
no really something like
http://www.northantsbees.fsnet.co.uk/images/hornet.jpg
and
http://www.northantsbees.fsnet.co.uk/images/wasp.jpg
It didn’t have the distinctive markings of
Also the discription didn’t say that yellowjackets build these paper hives - more like they will use any crack that they can find.
somehow http://www.northantsbees.fsnet.co.uk/images/wasp.jpg
doesn’t link to what I saw at 1st - It is more like the 1st one - a little more black but w/o as many repeating stripes as the 2nd one.
Dudes, be careful! Multiple stings from anything are no joke!
This probably goes without saying, but if you want to play kill-the-critter yourself, 1. reconsider the use of volatile chemicals near your house/ bee assault vehicle/ old growth forsest; 2. get the kids and kitty cats locked away and warn your neighbors, lest they be stung by bees/ wasps/ hornets/ yellow jackets that, so far as they know, were “unprovoked.”
I think you might be talking about the Cicada Killer. I used to see these monsters all the time growing up in St. Louis. They had a rust-colored front half of their body, a traditional bumble-bee costume yellow-and-black-striped back half of their body, were the size of an adult thumb, and scared the crap out of you when they flew by, b/c they sounded like a diesel engine. I never was stung by one, probably b/c I gave them the widest berth possible.
One of the many reasons I moved to San Francisco - hardly any bugs!! Woo Hoo!!
Certainly looks similar, but what we have in the UK is [url=“http://www.uksafari.com/hornets.htm”]this](http://www.uky.edu/Agriculture/Entomology/entfacts/misc/ef004ci2.htm) (I notice this page trots out the party line “They have an unwarranted reputation for being aggressive” :rolleyes:)
Ok they look a little different dead in a pile on the ground then chasing after me. Today I did get a good look and they do indead look like the yellowjackets shown here:
but yellowjackets don’t build paper hives so I figured:
1 hornets built the hive and sold it to some yellowjackets
2 yellowjackets have a skill that before now man has never seen
3 Hi Opal
4 some yellowjackets and hornets got together and produced hellojackets which have skills of both.
5 they were skinny bumble bees
no really what is going on here
hornet = paper hive
yellow jacket = no paper hive
I got a paper hive
yellowjacket = stripe and dot pattern
hornet = more of a dot pattern
I got a stripe and dot pattern
Yellowjackets do indeed construct their nests from paper;
Initially, the queen contructs a small roughly cone-shaped cluster of about a dozen cells from chewed wood pulp and lays eggs that will grow into the first workers, when they mature, they set to work on the nest proper, which is usually roughly spherical, again, made from chewed wood pulp and may be up to the size of a basketball, containing multiple horizontal layers of paper ‘comb’ connected by a central stalk.
Here is quite a good photograph of a nest (that has been opened up).
It has it appered 3 honneycone layers in it. 2 were together (top of one was attached to the bottom of the other. and a 3rd single layer. Mine didn’t have any black and white tile floor though - perhaps it was on order. Also this nest was lighter in color - more gray then brown but that could just be local variation.