Yellow Jackets!

[mapper]

A story about a yellow jacket. This happened nearly 3 years ago. For our firewood we keep it under a shed and have a small rack in the garage that holds about what 1 row across a full-size pickup bed holds. We haul that much to the garage when needed, then carry enough for a day inside as needed and stack on the hearth next to the wood stove. One night I'm carrying wood inside and I grab a split block in the middle on the pointed edge. Soon after I feel something poking in the middle of my palm, but I ignore it at first thinking it's just a splinter. As I'm trying to grab a piece with my other hand the pain keeps getting worse until I realize it's not a splinter. I drop everything and go inside to run cold water on it and get some ice (don't really know why, that's just the first thing I thought about). I start worrying about what it could have been. Was it a scorpion, I've never been stung by one, how bad could this get? Could it have been a brown recluse, would the reaction be that quick? I finally go out to see what it was and this is what I found.

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I don't know why it was in my firewood unless it thought that was a good place to hibernate.

As far as removal, I just just hornet/wasp spray after dark until I no longer see activity. Depending on where it is I may dig it up, otherwise I'll just keep coming back for a few days. I'll typically shine the area with my headlights, they tend to not be able to see me that way and just fly towards the lights.

Yellow jackets queens do hibernate during the cold months and they do like a good woodpile to do it in. I have been stung in the arm and chest by the little boogers and had them wake up in the house and Buzz around. I get in the habit of giving each piece of firewood a quick look and knocking off any I find, they move really slow when cold so however many I find don't get too far before my size eleven descends on them
And remember, each one of them will start a new colony next summer, kill it and a couple hundred aren't going to be pestering you in a few months.
I also find them in the shop fairly frequently, sucking them into the dust collector gives a certain satisfaction, I wonder how they fare spinning around at high speed in the cyclone:confused2:

 

[txndncowboy]

Originally Posted by txndncowboy
They must be different kind here because I've never seen one come from a hole. They build a paper nest here but still attack if you get near them.

Those are probably guinea wasps if the nests are up high or out in the open. Yellow jackets are also a type of wasps and have a paper nest inside of their holes. Most of the time they either dig out a hole in the ground or build their nest inside of an object near the ground.

Well I've found them both high and low. In the open and in bushes. Brush up on the bush they are in and you get attached. Put an open beer out and they find it before you can finish it. Spray that water based but safe for plants quick knock down stuff on them and you'll kill what's there but in a few days others pick up where they left off and continue building that paper nest. Nasty little critters.

 

[scdeerslayer]

I have dug up a couple of those nests that have the hole in the ground type. After they are all dead, used a shovel and those nests are larger, under ground, than any of the paper type wasps except for the hornet nests we have around here. I don't know what makes those little bastages so angry....but they are. They have a sort of quick type of movement jerking up and down and are smaller than the other paper nest type of wasp. They love to snack on my pears and any kind of meat. I wish the fire ants would start snacking on the ground wasps.

Yep, the ones I've dug up have been about the size of a basketball with several layers of paper nests. I saw a video once of a yellow jacket nest that started under a recliner on a porch of an abandoned house, it was bigger than the recliner.

 

[scdeerslayer]

Yellow jackets queens do hibernate during the cold months and they do like a good woodpile to do it in. I have been stung in the arm and chest by the little boogers and had them wake up in the house and Buzz around. I get in the habit of giving each piece of firewood a quick look and knocking off any I find, they move really slow when cold so however many I find don't get too far before my size eleven descends on them
And remember, each one of them will start a new colony next summer, kill it and a couple hundred aren't going to be pestering you in a few months.
I also find them in the shop fairly frequently, sucking them into the dust collector gives a certain satisfaction, I wonder how they fare spinning around at high speed in the cyclone:confused2:

That's the only one I've seen or heard about. I've told the story to others that use wood for heat and none have ever heard of it before. Believe me, I killed it right after taking the pictures.

 

[Pilot]

We get them in the house now & then; they come in with the firewood. The vacuum cleaner works well on them.
As I have posted several times before, I trap the queens in the spring and it really hits the population. When we built our house there were yellow jackets all over the place. Started trapping about 22 (?) years ago and that seems to have slowly reduced the population. I was disappointed this year, I only trapped about 25 queens and was afraid we'd have a bad year, but it was the yellow jackets that had a bad year. Saw very few all summer long.

 

[dragoneggs]

We get them in the house now & then; they come in with the firewood. The vacuum cleaner works well on them.
As I have posted several times before, I trap the queens in the spring and it really hits the population. When we built our house there were yellow jackets all over the place. Started trapping about 22 (?) years ago and that seems to have slowly reduced the population. I was disappointed this year, I only trapped about 25 queens and was afraid we'd have a bad year, but it was the yellow jackets that had a bad year. Saw very few all summer long.

How do you trap them?

 

[mapper]

How do you trap them?

Pheromone traps in the spring when they first start to wake up. I find that the non-disposable traps seem to work a bit better for queen trapping.

 

[JasperFrank]

Shop Vac. with 2 inches of water and some dish soap. Get enough of the workers and the nest will collapse. The Wasp Killer sprays don't work.

 

[JakeLS]

I had them build a huge nest under the siding right next to the main entrance of my house last year. I got a duster and sprayed the h#ll out of them with delta dust one night. The next day there were still hundreds of white powder coated yellow jackets flying around. It didnt even phase them. That night I put sevin dust in the duster and sprayed that in there and they started falling out like rain.
The next time I came across a ground nest mowing I mixed a bottle of sevin dust in about a gallon of water and dumped it down the hole at night. No sign of them after that.

 

[bunyip]

I have found them nesting in trees, in walls, ceiling cavity and underground, they seem quite adept, I'm sure ours are the same but we caLL THEM EUROPEAN WASPS, if I get stung it is time for the epipen and a trip to hospital so I do my best to avoid them.
Seem to come in when the BBQ is going.