How to safely get rid of a wasp nest and the mice in my house without killing them

Factual Questions
1

I recently moved into a new house, and its gorgeous and seems to be well built. I love it! But apparantly the previous owners weren’t all that clean, because I can hear mice in my cupboards at night, eating our food. I don’t want to kill them, but I would like to get rid of them completely. Is that possible?

My other problem is that we have a lot of wasps around. Today I went on the roof and by chance had my ear near a ventilation duct, and I could hear what sounded like thousands of buzzing wings. I’m not going to go poking a flashlight in there because I don’t want to offend them and be eaten alive (If you think i’m paranoid, watch this video).

What’s the best way to conquer these two problems? Should I call in the pros? Aren’t they going to want to kill them all? I just want to give them their eviction notice so they know to go find a new home.

2

The wasps I’m guessing you’ll have to kill what’s there and keep the rest out. As far as the mice, they have live traps, but since the pros will probably only come in once a month, you’re gonna have to empty them yourselves.

I’m gonna say, you need to call in the Orkin man (or whomever you choose to use). Not only will they work to get rid of everything, they’ll tell you what YOU need to do to keep them out. (For example, they’ll point out the most likely every areas around your house and tell you to patch them, they’ll find that place where crumbs are falling behind the counter which is keeping the mice around etc…)

3

Disclaimer: IANA pest control expert. However, in my time I have dealt with both mice and wasps co-habiting with me.

Having neither wasps nor mice is contingent on “cleanliness”. The most immaculate homes can end up with mice and wasp problems. It’s just that those particular houses at that particular time and place happened to offer optimal habitat for those particular animals, and in they came.

There are any number of designs for humane mouse traps available; google “humane mouse trap” or “humane mouse control”. However, if the extent of your problem is such that you can hear little mousey feet running around in your walls at night, you have too many mice for traps to be effective–you have, IOW, an entire functioning colony of mice–and IMO you’re going to need to call in a professional exterminator, and yeah, mice are probably going to die. You can ask him to use humane traps, but then the problem of where he’s going to dump those captured mice arises: anywhere he puts them, they’re going to die. They’ve got a predator-free environment in your home, which is why they’re there. But if he, or you, dumps them in the nearby state forest, or farmland, there they are in the thick of things, with predators all around.

And if you just take them out in the yard, they’ll be back in the house by bedtime. They were out there originally, remember, and they know perfectly well how to get back inside.

Bear in mind that, whatever method you use, if you do manage, slowly but surely, to capture the adults foraging out in your kitchen, you’ll be leaving juveniles to starve, back in the nests in the walls. There isn’t any way to “persuade” a colony of mice to pack up Grandma and kids and move out.

Those ultrasonic rodent repellers do not work; don’t give money to any exterminator who promises to solve your mouse problem humanely by setting up one of those.

Setting out a few mouse traps yourself in my experience works only when you have one or two tentative residents checking out the premises, not an entire breeding colony.

Next, you need to consider whether the little mousey feet you’re hearing in the walls are indeed mice, and not rats. Rats are also not contingent upon “cleanliness”; they will also colonize perfectly clean human homes. Can you also hear gnawing sounds coming from the walls? What size are the droppings that are being left?

Question: Would you care about humane removal if they proved to be rats and not mice?

Removing wasps humanely is quite simple: all you do is knock down or otherwise destroy their nest, and then every time they start to rebuild it, knock it down again. Eventually they will get the hint and disappear. But you’ll have to watch that space every year, because if it offered prime habitat to wasps one year, it’ll continue to appear tempting to new colonizers.

You could wait until next winter when the colony normally declines to only the queen wasp, but then you’d be definitely killing her, because in the winter she wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.

You are also on your own as to how you destroy their nest without suffering multiple wasp trauma. :smiley: My dad used to stand on a ladder and use a really long stick to whack the nest that appeared under our eaves every spring–took one well-aimed hit, and then hustled back down the ladder and indoors for half an hour.

4

I agree with Joey, having had both problems. The wasps need to be exterminated, and quickly, before they do considerable damage… and I’m not just talking stings. Depending on where they’re building their nests, they can be eating through paperboard walls.

For mice, I’m sorry to say that extermination is the surest way of getting rid of them. At any major hardware store, you can buy what they call “humane” traps that trap them alive. But then you’ve got a live mouse in a trap. You can’t just release it in the yard, it goes right back into the house, so you wind up having to drive it many many miles away to release it and let it be someone else’s problem. Our suburb, for instance, has laws that prohibit releasing such a critter. The whole process is slow, it may take several days before they find your trap and go after the bait, depending on lots of factors (how hungry they are, how convenient are other food sources, etc.).

Basically, although I’m all for humane treatment, when they’re in my house, I want them out. (And, by the way, how humane is it to catch a mouse alive in a trap and leave them huddling and frightened there for hours until you get home to do something with them?)

5

There are live traps for the mice. The best one (which I can’t find in a quick search on the internet) is spring-powered with a sort of rotating cylinder inside a tunnel. The mouse goes through the tunnel, trips the trap, and the cylinder rotates, flinging it into a holding pen. The good thing about this trap is can hold several mice at once.
You MUST remember to check on the trap often, or the mice will no longer be alive.

One thing about live mice traps, however, is that there is nearly an inexhaustible supply of mice in the world. They breed almost faster than you can catch them. So unless you seal up the routes by which they’re entering your home, you will always have mice.
As for wasps – well, it’s hard to be tender-hearted about wasps. They don’t really understand the concept of live-and-let-live. I’d spray them.

6

Put cheese in the wasp nest and cover the mice in nectar. Pull up a chair.

7

After finding mouse crap in your cycling shoes, mouse piss in your sweaters, and holes chewed in your cereal boxes, I don’t think you’ll care all that much about the mice’s demise.
I went from considering humane (if more expensive) options, to wishing there was something contravening the Geneva convention for meeses after I found out what a mess they were making destroying all my stuff.

The wasps are going to be a similar hassle… if you’d really like, I’m sure you can ask for a garbage bag full of wasps to release in the wilderness, but it’s not something I would want to try.

8

I won’t turn this into a debate by asking you to explain why damaging and potentially dangerous rodents and insects should not be exterminated.

I will tell you that everyone I personally know who tried the humane route found it to be absolutely futile. Expecially when dealing with mice.

When my Ma (the Queen of clean) got mice in her house, we set up Decon bait stations. When we got mice in our own attic we set up Decon bait stations. In both cases within the month problem was gone for less than $20 each house. Sure you have to pick up some dead mice here and there. So what?

9

As a follow up to this thread, I sure wish I would have been able to take the advise presented and just call a professional. The landlord apparently hired the cheapest guys she could find. I woke up to giggling in my backyard and found two men with plumbers cleavage HOSING DOWN the wasp nest. They assured me they would all be gone by morning, and that they had done this “hundreds of times”.

This was total BS. The next day there were hundreds of wasps camping out on the spot where their nest used to be. The next day they were almost completely covered with a new nest. Taking matters into my own hands, I picked up a can of poison and went after them myself, obliterating all but fifteen in the ensuing slaughter. These 15 proceeded to build a new blanket-like nest for themselves in the next 24 hours. The landlord came by and thought it would be smart to hose them down again (why doesn’t anyone consult me first?). So now I am waiting for them to once again build a cozy little house before I finally wipe them out for good with another can of neurotoxin.

No progress on the mice yet, but i’m planning on calling a REAL professional this time!

Thanks by the way :slight_smile:

10

No. In my experience, eliminating mice is not possible without killing them. They can breed inside your house, or enter it from outside, faster than you can catch and release them. (And when you release them they’ll just come back.)

But they are vermin – food-destroying, property-damaging, disease-carrying vermin. Why would you want to keep them alive?

Besides using poison and traps, consider getting a cat. The cat will kill mice for you, without feeling any guilt at all. And just the presence of a cat will encourage mice to go elsewhere.

But you can’t get rid of mice completely without killing them.

11

Any possibility of getting a few pet snakes and releasing them into the walls of the house? When winter comes, they will either freeze to death or curl up somewhere for you to recapture. Just don’t let them breed too much, otherwise you’ll have to get a couple of mongoose.

12

I know it is totally against the rules and the spirit of the board for me to respond like this, but you sir/ma’am, are a god in the realm of us mere mortal posters.

My first Straight Dope book was a normal-sized paperback and the second was a quite heavy oversized paperback, and both of them were extremely popular in my bathroom, but there was no giggle as pure and right as the one you evoked with the above words.

My hat is off to you.

13

Anyone know how to get a few mongooses (mongeese?) out of the wall?

Good news is no more mice or snakes? :smiley:

14

By the way, I live with a couple of Buddhists, hence the pressure for me to find a more peaceful solution. They enjoyed the honey/cheese idea though :slight_smile:

15

Then, I take it, they are not Trappist Monks?

FML

16

D’ya have a magic flute?

17

This method probably won’t work for you unless you live in Alaska or some other northern location and are willing to wait for winter. A relative of mine in Russia froze his house to get rid of all pests — including rats and roaches. He just opened up all the windows, made sure there were drafts, and went on a four day weekend.

18

Just anecdotal, don’t know if this would work with a larger mouse colony, but my house was and remains (as it is essentially a house full of recently graduated college students) a fairly messy house with a kitchen that by all means should be attracting wildlife. A few years ago we had some mice and having seen the horrible suffering first hand at my job that glue traps cause (not only to the mice but to anyone who has to watch the mice gnawing off their own limbs in an attempt to escape), I was determined to use humane traps. I found some at Home Depot that are essentially little see-saw boxes in which the door is held open in one position and when the mouse teeters it by going inside to the end, the door closes. I had heard hints that mice really love peanut butter and so used this as bait and found it to work well. Mice would get trapped and I’d walk a couple blocks away and release them into the woods. Probably trapped 8-10 mice total and haven’t seen any mice in our house since, despite the ongoing lack of kitchen cleanliness.

19

I wish there was a voting function enabled on this board, I would vote for this post.

20

Asian mongoose-eating baboons.