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What Will Keep Wasps & Bumblebees from the Yard?

The two basic techniques to maintain wasps and bumblebees from your lawn is to ensure nothing in your lawn attracts their attention and also to find and ruin their neighboring blacks. Applying insecticide into a wasp or bumblebee nest or physically removing a nest requires wearing protective clothing, like a facial mask, cuffs of the pants taped into your own socks and a long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs taped into gloves.

Wasp and Bumblebee Basics

Members of many species of wasps, a few of which are called yellow coats or hornets, have slender bodies and narrow waists. The European paper wasp (Polistes dominula) typically builds its paperlike nests beneath the eaves of buildings or within walls, as do the aerial yellow jacket (Dolichovespula arenaria) and also the bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata). The common wasp (Vespula vulgaris), also referred to as a yellow jacket, and also the Western yellow jacket (Vespula pensylvanica), build their nests in the ground. Big, hairy, orange or yellow and black bumblebees, members of the bee genus Bombus, build their nests underground. Bumblebees that nest in the ground are controlled in precisely the same way as wasps that build ground nests.

Life Cycle and Control

Bumblebee and wasp colonies form in spring and die in autumn. New queens leave their nests in late summer, mate with males and find a crack or crevice in which to spend winter while dormant. Wasps feed caterpillars, flies and other insects in spring and early summer. After the queen wasp stops laying eggs in late summer and autumn, worker wasps collect carbohydrates and sweets. They collect those nutrients from garbage cans with refuse and out of sugary foods and soft drink containers. Keep lids on garbage cans and cover sweet foods during picnics and barbecues to prevent wasps and bumblebees from hanging around your lawn.

Insecticidal Control

The ideal time to kill wasps inside their nest is in June when the colony is still modest and at night once the wasps are less active than during daylight. If a wasp nest is beneath eaves, use an insecticidal dust labeled for use inside homes and containing the active ingredients boric acid, bendiocarb or chlorpyrifos. Boric acid is the safest way to use but takes more time to work than another active ingredient choices. If the wasps live within a wall, drill 1/8-inch wide holes in the wall, and use a plastic container with a spout or tube tip to “puff” that the insecticide to the holes. Eliminate yellow coats that nest in the ground by pouring a solution of laundry or dish soap and water to the entrance of the nest. If that does not work, employ a dust containing the active ingredient carbaryl or chlorpyrifos, or a liquid concentrate containing carbaryl, acephate or diazinon. Dusts are more effective than liquids since liquids frequently don’t penetrate an entire nest. Bumblebee nests are handled exactly the same way as wasp ground whistle. Apply an insecticide according the directions on its label.

Non-Insecticidal Control

Removing a wasp nest that’s under an eave can be done by using a shovel to knock the nest to a garbage bag. Sealing the bag and placing it in a freezer or leaving it in hot sunlight kills wasps within the bag. Should you see wasps enter or exit a nest within a wall, prop the wand of a shop vacuum a few inches from the wall, and run the vacuum for many hours three or four nights. That’ll literally suck the wasps from the wall. Vacuuming bumblebees from their bottom nest hole also is possible, although placing a board or tape over most of the nest hole could be essential to make the vacuum effective.

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