Is there anything I can do to discourage wasps from building nests under my eaves?

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

So we live on several acres, and so, apparently, do a number of wasps. At the end of last summer, we successfully deterred them from building nests under our low eaves by whacking the hell out of any nest they started to build.

“We’ll show them,” they decided, and started building their nests up higher. We have a peaked second floor roof that’s waaaaaaaaay off the ground, much higher than we can reach with an extension pole or roof rake. There’s part of a nest from last year in two spots that we can’t reach.

Luckily, winter came, so we were given a reprieve.

Now it’s close to spring, and we’re seeing wasps again. Is there anything we can do in the two spots they seem to like to build their nests to make it less hospitable? Big spikes? Anti-wasp spray? Wasp-eating snakes? Help!

#2

I’ve had success with fake wasp nests like this one. If you hang it near to where the wasps normally build their nests, they’ll think that there already is a nest there, and being territorial, won’t build one themselves.

On similar threads on this topic, some posters have said they’ve not had success with this approach, so it may be a YMMV issue. Maybe here in Saskatchewan we have dumb wasps. :stuck_out_tongue:

#3

What color is your house? My neighbor’s house was a light beige color and he always seemed to have a bee/wasp issue. My house at the time was a light salmon color and I would get an occasional nest but nothing like he would get. He told me that a exterminator told him that they are attracted to certain colors, but I don’t know if that is really true. But I didn’t have the issues he had.

When I did get one, I would catch it early on and spray it. If I did get them, they were usually in the very peak of the eave, so I would just get on my ladder and spray them. The sprayer I had could shoot like 10 feet, so I didn’t have to get too close. But be careful as you are on a ladder! Good luck.

#4

Raid Wasp & Hornet Killer can easily shoot a good 20 feet, with a high-volume jet (not a spray/mist), so you can saturate a big nest from far away very quickly. This lets you spray the nest from just a couple of steps up on a ladder, instead of being ten feet off the ground - safer if you lose your balance or have to leave the area quickly because of a counterattack. Also helps to work after dark, when the insects are all home to roost and have settled down.

I haven’t particularly tried to cure the problem, just manage it; about once a month during the summer I go around our house and blast whatever nests I find, and that keeps the population small.

If you’ve got nests that are really high up, you can buy a device at Home Depot that holds a can of insect spray on the end of a long pole. You can stand on the ground, hold the can on the end of the pole a couple of feet from the nest, and then pull a string to trigger the spray mechanism. This takes two hands to operate though, so if you’re going to use it after dark, you’ll need a helper to hold a flashlight for you.

#5

I discovered a long time ago that WD-40 was a great bug killer and repellant. You can spray it in a little hole in the wood and they never come back. I’m not positive it would work with wasps, but it’s cheap and easy enough to try.

#6

I heard this on, I think, Designed To Sell, when they were including a porch in the parts of the house they were fixing up. The guy said to paint the porch ceiling light blue and it would discourage insects from building nests there because they would feel like it was the open sky, and they wouldn’t want to build their nest under the open sky.

Don’t know if it’s true; don’t know if it works for wasps; don’t know if it works for eaves as well as for a porch.

Just sharin’ is all.
Roddy

#7

True. Light blue mimics the color of the sky. Our old house had light blue eaves and facia board and we never had any wasp nests in the 14 years we were there. Moved to a new house 4 miles away with brown eaves and facia board, and I’ve been spraying wasps that are trying to build nests every spring for the last 3 years.