I have several wasps’ nests around my woodshop. I leave them be for the most part. It’s in a location where little children are around. Woodshops are generally hazardous particularly to children …
… [wolfish grin] …
… so anything that helps chasing them off is a good thing. They don’t bother me at all, never been stung. I do get complaints from the neighborhood’s parent-types about three or four times a year. Phaw, fuck them, keep your snot-nose little bastards away from my stuff and you won’t have a problem. I just remind them that we’re allow in our community to keep skunks as pets, maybe wasps aren’t so bad after all.
For the record, wasps hibernate over the winter, best to kill them now or they will be back next spring. Place a four foot by four foot piece of metal window screen over the ground nest, block it down and starve the little babies to death. It’s cruel and inhumane and I hope aphids destroy your roses.
Plant sprayer bottle. Small amount of dish soap in the water.
Knocks them down and gums them up. They can’t fly or breath, or warn their friends of danger.
Many years ago in my old house, I had a basketball sized wasp nest 30’ up a tree where I couldn’t get to it. Over the course of a week or so, I killed over 300 wasps simply by walking around my backyard with the spray bottle, spraying them out of the air and then stepping on them. Got 60 or so at a time and never got stung.
Got to watch out if you’ve been the victim of multiple wasp stings - in my experience and that of others, this marks you as a wasp enemy for weeks (and can’t be washed off - I think it might even be systemic) - I found other wasps sought me out and attacked me without any provocation after just such an incident.
There are a lot of videos on Youtube of people placing glass bowls over yellowjacket nests. Apparently if you cover the hole with dirt they’ll make a new opening, but if they can see daylight through the original opening they’ll keep trying to escape from that one. You could probably starve a nest out if you went out at night and sealed a glass bowl over the opening, or the greenhouse effect in the bowl the next day would heat stress the bastards to death.
I got stung by a yellow jacket on Monday on my lip because it got inside my beer bottle. F-ing bastard. Fortunately it was a minor sting and my lip didn’t swell up too much. I think I’m like a snake charmer, I’ve been stung so many times that they don’t bug me any more.
I ended up spitting it out pretty quickly and stomping it real good. After I told my daughter, she replied “Oh no, is the bee ok?”
On vacation about a month ago my wife got stung four times and had an allergic reaction. We almost took her to the ER. When we got home we got her a prescription for an epi pen.
The next day we found a yellow jacket nest under our front step.
I told her I was honored to defend the lives of my family from the black and yellow winged death. Once darkness fell, in jeans in a jacket of my own I armed myself with a can of long distance YJ spray for nests and a can of misting spray that kills on contact.
The nest was quiet. Too quiet.
I open fire on the hole where the nest was, spraying into the crack between our front step and the foundation of our house. After a few seconds a yellow jacket tried to escape. I had been expecting this, and switched to the mist, knocking her out of the air. I cackled with mad glee.
I misted over the entry to the nest, in case more tried to come out. Choke on that Vespula! I switched back to the nest killer, a prayer of death on my lips. More tried to make a break for safety, but couldn’t fly once they hit the mist. I must have lapsed into a frenzied rage, because the next thing I knew the can was sputtering empty and there were a dozen dead jackets around me.
I picked off one last survivor with the mist, waited another minute to make sure I wasn’t being followed, and went inside to wash off the bug spray and death.
I hate yellow jackets
That was two week and two cans of spray ago. Occasionally we see more around the hole. We’ve sprayed more, covered it with mulch, and set multiple yellow jacket traps. Their numbers have significantly dropped since the second major offensive on 9/4. I think they’re finally all dead.
We do in San Diego. I know that from firsthand experience. One crawled into my shirt a couple of weeks ago and got me right in the center of the back while I was driving down a busy road. I pulled over, jumped out of the car, and it was sitting there right in the middle of the seat, little bastard.
