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I dislike and don’t recommend introducing any broad spectrum insecticide into the environment this way, at least not if there’s a decent alternative that uses natural methods. It just so happens that I discovered one such way to rid an area of wasps, including yellowjackets, hornets, mud-dawbers, and just about any other type of wasp you can imagine.
The simple trick, which cleared all the wasps out of a 3 city block area in a week, was to get a nice bone in pork shoulder roast, hang it off the cross brace for the clothes line in the back yard, place a bucket underneath it 2/3 full of water with a little dish soap mixed in. in the first 24 hours, the bucket was near full of dead wasps. Over the next two days, the body count became less and less, and the roast was stripped to the bone once and had to be replaced. At the end of that time, there wasn’t a single wasp of any kind to be found anywhere in the neighborhood. Prior to that, you couldn’t walk in the yard outside without shoes on or you’d get stung, they were so bad.
Once you find their weakness, you exploit it. Wasps will gorge themselves on raw meat when they find it, and they can’t fly away, so they drop to the ground. In this case, they drop in the bucket and drown instead. You might think that a pork roast hanging out in the heat would start to smell, and it did for a bit, till the wasps got a whiff, then they ate it so fast it didn’t have time to spoil.
One warning. You need to make sure you hang the roast so other critters can’t get to it. A fenced in yard should keep the neighbor’s dog out. You just gotta be smart about it and think who might be around. If need be, you could enclose the whole setup in a temporary cage setup of some sort. The wasps won’t care about it being caged, as long as they can get to it.
We do it a little different,
Fill a 5 gallon bucket with a couple of gallons water, hang a fish over bucket, wasps eat fish, fall into bucket. All the wasps magically disappear from around your living space and end up in the bucket . It’s amazing to see the wasps eat all the flesh off a trout, all thats left is the bones and head. Depending on how many wasps, they can consume a whole fish in a couple of days, Just make sure you empty the bucket and refill when the surface of the water is full of dead wasps. We do it in the early morning hrs before it starts getting warm.
Awesome. Thank you!
What a wonderful submission. It is on the list to try immediately. We have the wasp attractant and will purchase the Frontline product. My wife is allergic, and after being bit/stung twice in two weeks my first year in the redoubt I went to war with the critters. Hopefully this will resolve the issue quickly every spring.
Hanging a fish or a piece of chicken over a bucket of water works too.
I saw this post yesterday, too, and was intrigued by the idea the wasps themselves would return treated proteins to the nests and kill everyone, including the queen, in record time.
But I didn’t understand why the flea and tic treatments had to contain ONLY FIPRONIL. I put out research requests to our County Extension and a site called domyown.com, which markets itself as a do-it-yourself pest control source.
After Do My Own regurgitated the ubiquitous PTA pap about not being able to recommend any poison be added to something edible to humans, the bottom line was that FIPRONIL, the active ingredient in pet flea and tic treatments Frontline and Sentry, was by itself incredibly effective against all kinds of insects.
However OTC “Plus” products contain other ingredients such as methoprene, which interrupts the flea and tic lifecycle so it gets eggs, larvae and pupae / nymphs too.)
The rep explained this extra ingredient could be slightly repellent to some wasps, which is contrary to the whole point of poison bait, but that it had no action on them and shouldn’t really be a factor in a DYI wasp bait.
Being a sales rep, he of course recommended two of the company’s own products, TAURUS, which is 9.1% FIPRONIL, and ONSLAUGHT, the active ingredient of which is ESFENVALERATE, a synthetic pyrethrum.
They have an entire kits and offer online instructions here:
https://www.domyown.com/how-to-get-rid-of-wasps-a-505.html
(Insert here the usual I have no financial association, don’t get nothin’ for talking about it, yadda yadda yadda….)
I also found an interesting study conducted between 2012 and 2014 published in the International Journal of Pest Management entitled “Controlling Yellow-jackets with Fipronil-based Protein Baits in Urban Recreational Areas.”
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670874.2016.1227883
They suggest micro-polymere water absorbing crystals, such as are used in potting soil, mixed with FIPRONIL and the juice from canned chicken as an alternative to hamburger. It’s supposed to last longer than fresh meat, and since honey bees go for sugars, not proteins, they won’t be exposed.
There’s a wasp sting on my stern that’s been itching for 5 days now, and we’re pretty much paralyzed here, getting nothing done outside. I’m going to try them all!
Excellent ideas, thanks
Oh what fun it is to be horseback when she steps into a nest of ground bees. What a wild ride.
The BEST post I’ve ever read here!! Thank you Patrice.
This is great, thank you for posting. I’m especially glad to see if doesn’t effect honey bees.
I hate wasps!
This is better than pouring gas on a ground nest, accidentally igniting the gas vapors and then nearly catching the fence on fire on a hot summer day! Thank you for this good idea.
Back on the farm we had a maggotry i.e. a cone of 1/4 in. hardware cloth hung up in the chicken yard that we dumped all of your noncompostable food and meat trimmings. The fly’s would lay eggs and the maggots would drop to the ground and be eaten. I wounder if chickens could eat gorged wasps without harm?
Thank you so much for this post!!! I am nursing a bad wasp sting on my hand from yesterday.
The war is on and now I have the ammunition to do battle and WIN.
Excellent post 😉
If you want to have fun and get some target practice in while ridding the yard of yellow jackets, try the Bug-A-Salt gun. I tried it out on the yellow jackets raiding the apple tree, and found that the first hit will either mess em up good or at least partially cripple them. They don’t seem to make the connection to the person firing the gun, so they don’t attack you if you miss. The Bug-A-Salt is a air powered shotgun using table salt. It’s a LOT of fun!
Probably not a good idea to hang out meat baits if you have bears in your area.
TIP: After spraying and killing wasps working on their cone, do not remove it. Leave it in place and you will find that wasps will not return at a later date as they detect something is wrong with that location.