Ground Wasps

Michael W. Smith · #21 08/27/14, 09:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Harry Chickpea

You can also just place the top half of a 2 liter soda bottle over the hole and weight it to stay in place. The wasps will fly up into it and die from heat/dehydration/starving.

ANY container that lets light in will work - an upside down bowl, a glass jar, etc. The wasp / yellow jacket / whatever flys toward the light. They will spend all day long trying to get out and they don't understand that if they just dug out AROUND the clear barrier, they would be free again. A clear containter on a hot day cooks them.

What is up with all this pouring poisons into the ground? Sevin, gasoline, kerosene, lighter fluid, etc???? I thought we as homesteaders are averse to poisoning our land? (But I do understand completely - it is so much FUN to pour a flammable liquid down the hole and set it on fire to burn those stinging insects!!!)

I would suggest marking (and knowing) right where their hole is. Go back at night and keeping your flashlight to the minimum quickly put a glass jar, bowl whatever over the hole. The next day you bring your lawn chair to the site to watch hundreds of them flying into the container and trying to get out. It doesn't take long with no water or food being supplied to wipe out the pests.

Harry Chickpea · #22 08/27/14, 10:39 AM

Yep. All that other stuff costs money. I got better purposes for that.

MoonRiver · #23 08/27/14, 06:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by handymama

Don't they start coming out at dawn? Which is at like 5:30 am here in TN...

You must be right on the beginning edge of Central Time. Sunrise here is about 6:45.

handymama · #24 08/27/14, 10:14 PM

That's weird. No I'm thirty minutes away from north Carolina, and when I'm up at 5:30 its getting light. Course I guess that's not technically sunrise, just dawn. But that's when I start seeing active bees on my flowers.

Rick · #25 08/28/14, 01:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by handymama

That's weird. No I'm thirty minutes away from north Carolina, and when I'm up at 5:30 its getting light. Course I guess that's not technically sunrise, just dawn. But that's when I start seeing active bees on my flowers.

Birds and Bees set their timepieces to the next time zone to the East.

Ask my hens.

handymama · #26 08/28/14, 05:08 PM

Y'all are officially bad luck! I just found a new yellow jacket nest while I was weedeating. Got stung twice. They die at sundown!

TnTnTn · #27 08/28/14, 08:56 PM

Yep, a weedeater is the best instrument ever developed to find and pi** off yellow jackets. I don't use mine after mid June as I'm allergic to their stings.

handymama · #28 08/28/14, 08:58 PM

All I've got to say is owww

handymama · #29 08/29/14, 01:07 AM

Hope we got them. Hard to see in the dark but found a hole in the area where they went nuts earlier.

**Shrek** · #30 08/29/14, 02:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MoonRiver

I found, or maybe I should say it found me, a ground wasp nest last time I cut the grass. I didn't get stung, but hundreds of wasps took to the air when I ran over their hole.

Give me your opinion on my attack plan. The nest is on the back of my property and there is no shelter near it. I could get my SUV within 30' or so.

I'm thinking of filling a couple of balloons with kerosene and lobbing them at the hole. I think putting a pin prick in each balloon might be good in case they don't burst.

How far from the nest do I have to be to go unnoticed? When I walk near them, say about 10', they ignore me. When I ran over the nest, I stopped the lawn mower about 30' away and they didn't come after me. So if I get behind a tree about 10' from the nest and lob balloons, what's my chances of getting away stung free?

I know it is best to do at night, but I hate to have to run a hundred yards or so to get back to the house in the dark. They don't seem very active in the morning, so maybe a dawn attack would work.

All you have to do is identify where the entrance hole is during the day after the grass has been mowed and then wait until after dark and with flashlight in hand go to the hole with a can of stream for distance wasp and hornet spray and empty the whole can into the entrance.

Whatever yellow jackets on sleep guard that don't die on contact with the spray will die from the fumes in the ground nest. if any do survive the vapors they will move on the next day.

Use of a $3 can of wasp spray also does not pose as much of a ground fire hazard as gasoline or kerosene which costs about the same to pour a gallon down the entrance to gas the colony.

We used kerosene to gas a ground nest in the early 1990s and two weeks later my wife chose to burn some leaves near the kerosene saturated entrance and set off a ground fire that took me about an hour using the hose to flood the nest area, which according to the extension office agent I know explained to me most likely had soaked up the kerosene like a buried pile of oily rags and started smoldering after the grass and leaves flashed the fuel vapors still in the nest tunnels.