Help with reducing the number of wasps

Tell your daughter not to run. Wasps tend to chase anything that moves. i learned this the hard way

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Ted H

You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas.
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hair spray

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"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

uhhhh, i could have wrote all these posts!!! we moved to this little house in feb and just this week, it warmed up to the 80s and now they are everywhere!!! i cant even go from house to car without getting chased!! I have a phobia of anything that stings, but i feel like they are worse than any other year!!! it almost, and i said almost, makes me want to move to town, but i was in town today and there are wasps all over too! We are in IL, do you think the state let loose a bunch extra to get rid of the buffalo gnats they let loose a few years ago to get rid of the mesquitos.....ughhhh ??? i truly and scared!!

Different things will work for different wasps - just poisoning them after they've already infested your place will be an un-winnable battle. (One that the chemical companies are happy to help you wage, year after year.) You want to hit them at their weak spot before they multiply for next year and look to anything in your environment that might be attracting them now.

State's ag departments publish on-line i.d. and management, look to your local government and if you have a master gardener's program in your area they should be trained to provide pest management too. If there's nothing there, maybe look to Texas, they pioneered the master gardener program and it's the best. Here's a link to California's sheet: http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PDF/PESTN...lowjackets.pdf

That said, get out the soapy guns for now, it usually works just as well as poison to beat them off, degreasers are very toxic. Yvonne's hubby, you have a good trick too! You could get those little cans and hand 'em out to the kids, Quick Draw McGraw, come on down...
If you have a nest, of course take it out. But Malathion is bad news for people, and Sevin dust?

I used wads of printer paper stuffed into the 4 upper corners of 6 x 12 trailer as poision sachets for my little ennemies. No nests in there.

I am hoping for a better year than last. It seemed that anywhere I dropped a tree it landed on a ground hornet nest. I dropped a lot of trees last year.

I don't mind using the commercial sprays on nests as they are pretty localized but, with our bees hives I tend to worry about using the sugar baited traps. I don't like seeing my ladies dead at my hand.

different wasps require different approaches

Yellow jackets (YJ) are the most defensive and aggressive and the only people food eater. A YJ nest in your locale can get to 3000 wasps by the end of the fall. Now is when the queen YJ does all the food gathering for her firstborn workers.
- trapping queens now will eliminate nests.
Close and put away any wasp trap that attracts yellow jackets by mid-may
- otherwise you will just be attracting more to your area than without a trap.
Dealing with a YJ nest can be a challenge.

Some hornets in your locale can get aggressive. The only hornets here in CO are not as aggressive as some of larger black hornets I've seen in the midwest.

All of the other wasps are not so aggressive to people unless their little nests are near where you frequently pass. They also are beneficial, so eliminating them will upset the balance and cause some other complication. Wasps are territorial. So if you eliminate them from an area, they will be replaced. So I recommend that you do not use any preventive wasp sprays.

If you see dangling legs as a wasp flits about, it is not a YJ. YJ's tuck in their legs and zoom as they fly.

Permethrin is a very short life product, like hours (good for the garden). I find it hard to believe another exterminator would use such a product for wasp prevention. I could see using an aerosol pyrethroid to eliminate a nest (definitely NOT a big box hardware(HD) wasp spray), but not to prevent one. Some of the HD liquids (not aerosols) are months to a year in lifespan. These are not the same as what I use as a licensed exterminator. The differences I see are the active ingredient, the concentration, the volume in a purchased container, and the price. What I buy is not a HD brand, but they would work alright if used appropriately.

Regarding how to lessen your wasp population on your house: caulk closed all the little cracks and holes on the siding, soffet and roof edge. When you see wasps (not hornets or YJ's), rather than getting afraid or defensive, watch what they do, and where they go. Their mission is to collect food to feed their larvae, not attack you. If they are not collecting food, they are working on their "nest". If you destroy their nest while they are hunting for food, they will just build another, likely in the same place.

You can alter the wasp population by altering their food supply, water supply, or habitat. Do you have plants near or around your house which provide the wasps with a lot of food? If you pay attention to their behaviour pattern, you can impact them without using lots of pesticide.
Gary

caulk any cracks or small openings that they can get into to make their nests..close things up tight..and if you have exposed rafters, cover them with soffit and caulk the cracks..they love to make nests in open rafters..

also behind shutters, so put a long lasting spray behind any shutters or window boxes..

but remember also ..wasps are some of your best predators, and most wasps actually do NOT sting, unless you swat at them..it is generally a fear that is unfounded that makes you swat and then get stung..

my suggestion would be to seal the areas from nesting spaces..and then just try to not panic around them

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Brenda Groth
http://restfultrailsfoodforestgarden.blogspot.com/

If you can't find the nests, maybe you have the type that nest in the ground...

I hate to tell you this, but they are MUCH harder to deal with. Even if you can find their nests, most of the ways that you can get rid of them are environmentally too toxic...

YJ's are the wasp I saw with nests in the ground. Their nests could also be in a bush, tree, bbq grill, hot tub, shed, garage, anywhere. While YJ's are more difficult to exterminate than other wasps, the YJ nests in the ground are no more difficult to exterminate than the other YJ nests. Sometimes easier.

YJ's rarely move their nest. As the summer proceeds, the nest population grows quickly. About mid July, it is easy to spot a nest wherever it is located by just watching those wasps you see. They go directly home after snagging some food. The entry is like an airport.

I used a high vapor pressure aerosol pyrethrin. This is very low in toxicity with minimal environmental risk. I have seen people buy 5 cans of wasp spray to handle 1 nest. I used 1 can of pyrethrin spray for about 50 nests. When I could not get to the nest entry, I would use Drione dust. It is DE and pyrethrin. Dusts are more toxic if inhaled, so I only used that when other choices would not work well.

YJ's have a pie shaped area of food foraging near their nest of about 100 yards. If you have a creek or pond nearby, there could be many nests whose pies overlap where you are. This means if you see a lot of YJ's you could have several nests in your area.

I had a job once where a woman allergic to their sting had 3 YJ traps on her porch. I rarely needed to wear much protective clothing to exterminate a nest (usually just long heavy neoprene gloves, light rain jacket and a head screen), but I had to on her porch. There was a nest right on her porch wall near her light. I stood and watched the worker wasps come and go and not go near the traps within a few feet of the nest entry. Hence, each wasp had a slice of pie assigned for food foraging and went directly there. So the traps she had were attracting wasps from every nearby nest and having almost no impact on the nest right there. The other wasps were why I had to wear extra protective clothing, not the nest on her porch.

My recommendation about the YJ traps, if you must use them, is to place near the neighbor you don't like.

Thanks for the advice and the commiseration everyone, lol! I have yellow jackets and red wasps, no dirt daubers that I've seen. They were really aggressive all summer last year, sure hope this isn't a repeat, but they're already starting.

I knocked down every nest I could find and plugged up all the holes I could and sprayed. Then I had the professional out to get under the house and in the attic to get rid of any he found and to spray, hoping that would do the trick, but no such luck. I've made sure there are no flowers or bushes growing anywhere close to the house.

I tried several different types of traps last year and never caught a single wasp in any of them! I even tried hanging the baggies full of water with a penny inside that are supposed to get rid of flies. I was desperate, I tried everything!

I've even changed my soap, shampoo and deodorant several times and quit wearing perfume altogether (which I miss a lot!), thinking one or all of those might be what's attracing them, but they still love me, lol.

Gary, I love your idea about the YJ traps, ROFL! I have one neighbor who has a dog that NEVER shuts up...but with my luck they'd just sting the dog, not the owners, who are the ones too stupid or too lazy to train the dog, lol.

Yer just to sweet.

Hang up fake wasp nests. They are somewhat territorial, so it will keep some away. make the old fashioned wasp catchers, but put them away from your house. Citonella candles, marigolds, don't knock down spider webs between trees. Hair spray applied directly will kill them.

Yup I always close up any holes they can use with caulk or such..

As well I have always heard that if you paint the underside of your porch ceiling and eaves and such a nice sky blue that matches a cloudless sky the paper wasps won't build a nest under there. Something about their primitive minds seeing sky blue above them and being tricked into thinking the place is open to the sky and is not good for shelter even if they are standing on the blue ceiling..

I've heard it a lot, but never tried it myself..

Mama and Tx, you both have some good ideas, thanks! I'll definitely be trying some of the ideas everyone has posted.

Well I looked around and read a bit, it's quite interesting to get both sides of the blue paint theory..

From it works, to it doesn't work, to the fact that older blue paints may have worked because they had lime or lye in them that would be an insect repellent where modern paints do not.

Though I know you can buy paints with insect repellent properties expressly to keep spiders and such off your walls and ceilings/eaves..

Like maybe this stuff... non toxic all natural oils based repellent to add to paint...

http://www.non-toxic-pest-control.co...sect-repellent

Had a ground nest at the very back of my land last year. I would have just let em be but we were building fence and using an air powered t-post driver and they started getting pretty riled up when we got about 50 feet away shaking the ground.

Poured a bit of gas in there followed by a large stick stopping up the hole.. That definitely did the trick.

I second the fake nest idea. We were having problems with dozens of wasps hanging out right by the door...I couldn't stand it because I have a hypersensitive reaction to stings and was always afraid to open the door because they would always come swooping down and terrorize me. We tried spraying and all that but more would always show up! Anyway, we saw an add in Mother Earth News for these fake hornet's nest things and decided to try to make some ourselves...so we used newspaper and strips of grey foam-like packaging material. We hung them up outside the door right away and it solved the problem instantly. I only saw a couple of wasps in the area for the rest of the summer.

Blue paint on the porch ceiling has worked for me. Not 100% perfectly, but pretty durn close. We had a brown porch roof, and plenty of wasps on it, mud daubers to paper wasps. Repainted it sky blue, and I think we've had 1 paper wasp nest start, and maybe two small mud dauber tubes.

This time of year the nests are just starting, and the queens are quite timid. Excellent time to keep them from getting going. In a few months it will become much more difficult as the nest will be large and well populated. Just a few minutes every day or two walking around your place with a spray can of insecticide and a stick to knock things down with. Do kill the queen. If you just drive her off, she will start building somewhere else.

Most wasps are very beneficial but I DO understand those who are allergic, just cannot have them busy on their porches.

Get some orange oil. Its so good for many things. Its very concentrated. I dilute some-about 2-1 water to oil, wipe down generously the corners of the porch & other areas where you think they'll build. Kept them away for 3 yrs b/4 had to do it again. Great cleaner, too.

You know those huge ugly web worms killing so many trees? Wasps are their natural predators.

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