Yellowjackets -- the wasp/hornet

The powder takes a few days as they walk over it and track it into the nest. When I "Sevin" powdered my yellow jacket ground nest, somewhere around day 4 there was zero outside activity. A few days later I got brave and dug, but had a can of wasp & hornet spray ready to go. The nest ended up being about 2' from where I saw them going into the leaves (the hole) and about an inch below dirt. It was ~6" diameter and 3 layers deep. There were several still alive at the bottom, including the queen. The spray took care of that.

 

Here see some pics of a now dormant nest, I kinda knew was being built as I could see the insects gathering the clay mud from a wet hole I'd dug in the backyard a few years ago. The reason I didn't see it for several months while the bugs were working as that best was the seeky devils built it above the garage doors and with the door up, when I was in there it (the nest) was out of site. When I finally pulled down the door while I was inside the garage I looked up and low I beheld the project in all it's working glory. I sheepishly closed the door and went online to see if I could figure out what to do about it. The one bit of advise that I took away from my search was "if you don;t want them to return next spring, just leave it where it is" and luckily in my case that is how it turned out. eeasy peesy ...

 

There are some interesting videos on youtube for yellow jacket nest removal, etc. Fun to watch every now and then. Learned a lot!

 

I found a rather disturbing combination of ant nest(s) in my attic a few years back complete with fliers at least 1 unseen Queen with a nest of sawdust below one of the two attic windows and two other Queens that wandered out form somewhere while I was sleeping and a massive carpenters group that overflowed after detecting and finally fully exposing the general congregation.
It wasn't fun, especially since I still had the original 100 year old cedar shingles on the roof under 2 layers of asphalt shingles with a layer of rolled asphalt between them. To make things twice as hard for myself I tried my best to coral the fliers when I found them so they wouldn't populate the neighborhood as I think that is what the fliers do. I found the fliers first by chance while learning about how this old house was built so I could be more effective with my HVAC choices, mostly in this case how to best ventilation from basement to attic, with all the advice one gets while doing that sort of thing. I'll leave out the gory details of what I believe is a near full eradication of this houses ant issues, and save them for some other day, maybe.

 

Your rafters have earned the Atlas award.

 

Last Fall I was splitting sone firewood and the yellow jackets took offence with the vibrations and came after me. Declaring war on me was an error as i still have some outlawed insecticides in my garage, After letting their upset die out, I gave the in ground nest a dose and the war was over.

JeffD

 

Just hearing that story, I need a smoke. And I've never smoked.

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