Fortunately, we don’t have many yellow jackets around our place: Occasionally, a stray shows up, but not very often. A little more often a couple stray hornets (which are actually a large type of yellow jacket) show up - not regularly, thank heavens.
To make up for that, we get plenty of all kinds of wasps and bees, from tinier than sweat bees to mud daubers and paper wasps, to wood bees and, occasionally, those big honkin’ cicada killer wasps.
Checking online, it looks like the wood bees are best attracted with straight up sugar water + Borax. Before it got mostly regulated out of existence, solvent base Liquid Nails in caulk gun tubes was great for plugging wood bee holes at night, and did not affect other pollinators.
If your yellow jackets carry enough bait back to the nest, you may be able to “kill” it. I’d at least try increasing the number of bait stations (soda cans) drastically if after a few weeks you see traffic continuing to what you initially set out.
Best of luck to you!
The wood “borer” bees never bother me. So far, it’s always been yellow jackets first, and wasps, second. It’s always in a surprise situation. Last summer, I was at my daughter’s (outdoor) baby shower just sitting at a table with 5 other people. I have no idea why that YJ decided that it should go for ME over any of the other 5 people at the table, or any of the other 25 people in the garden courtyard when the festivities were held. So sometimes I am just very unlucky. I recovered in a few days.
We had a bit of a rainstorm today, so I noticed that 2 of the baits were tipped over. Going to refill them tomorrow, and add a few more stations.