Wasp Control Advice Direct From the Professionals, What to Inspect For and How to Treat

By: robert jeffries Click author's name for more of his/her articles

Although summer is nearly over, wasps are still about and they will remain a serious pest well in to late October, all the time adding to their nest. Inside a wasp nest there are up to 18000 individual wasps each one have a very specific role within the colony. Fertile females must reproduce, the workers are there to fabricate and tend the nest and the guards are there, as their name suggests, are there to defense the nest from predators and anything that may cause harm to the colony survival.

The worker wasps have lots of jobs, they must tend to the eggs and larvae within the nest and they must fetch food for the whole colony but perhaps the most imperative task is construction and maintenance of the nest. A wasp nest is made from slithers of wood which the worker wasps scrape and chew from a variety of sources such as fence panels and garden sheds. This wood is next chewed, mixed with saliva and next carefully crafted onto the chief nest. As the wasp colony grows so the nest needs to expand to accommodate all of the individuals.

Come the end of the autumn the nest will die off and all but the following years queens will die with it. Nests are not repopulated ever they will just lie like an abandoned property until they rupture up many years later if left undisturbed.

The new nest starts off by one fertile queen constructing a single cell nest at the end of summer in a new location. Here the queen wasp will overwinter or hibernate until the temperatures rise. At this point she will start laying eggs which will hatch into worker wasps. These wasps mature and start feeding the queen and building on to the single cell nest. As the population increases so does the perform force that ensures survival of the species for the after that year.

Wasps are attracted to two things UV light and sweet sugary foods. If anything containing sugar is left out next wasps will find it. Even if there is no nest in your immediate vicinity, you can still get a large number of worker wasps foraging which will reason nuisance and annoyance. Worker wasps will travel up to 3 kilometres in search of food. In this instance eradicate is best achieved by the use of wasp pots. These wasp pots contain a sweet sugary liquid which attracts works in to a funnel which they cannot escape out of and eventually they drown in the liquid.

If you can see where wasps are entering in to their nest next a easy treatment using a wasp powder applied directly into the entrance hole is enough to eradicate the whole nest. This works well as the worker entering the nest carry the poison dust deep into the nest for you.

If you can really see the nest which looks like a big cream coloured football generally hanging from the roof or beams next treatment is best effective buy spraying it thoroughly with a residual insecticide such as digrain insecticide spray which will coat the nest and stop the guard stinging you. The insecticide will leak into the nest eventually killing all inside it.

If at all possible avoid treating a wasp nest inside an attic as there are lots of hazards associated with this including wasps being attracted to your torch light. If you appear closely you will always be able to find the entrance hole.