Insect versus man-Massive yellow jacket nest keeps woman afraid and indoors(Alabama)

Ledger-Enquirer ^ | 26 July 2006 | Brian McDearmon

[rahbert]

they eat fire ants. I seen 'em.

[AnAmericanMother]

It involves slow and I presume painful death for the little b@$+@&ds. That's good enough for me!

[Kimmers]

I agree, I love bees and they serve a great purpose.

[Blueflag]

Cool, informative site about yellow jackets.

http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC2510.htm

[Horatio Gates]

Sort of like the pit bulls of the bug world?

[Muzzle_em]

I think we have a nest in the attic or wall of our house.
If possible, I'm waiting until winter to get someone to check it out and spray. I shudder to think of what may be lurking in the attic.

[ConfusedAndLovingIt]

What amazed me, in doing a search online, was the number of websites that talk about getting rid of them without harming them. Whatta bunch of nutjobs.

The "don't harm nature's creatures" attitude lasts until the first time they get stung, then out comes the gasoline and matches.

[lafroste]

Does that stuff really work? I have been plagued by cicada killer wasps, they're big suckers and build individual nests (all over my back yard). I've had an exterminator out twice and he's mowed down thousands of them, but they haven't given up. The bug juice I've gotten from Lowe's doesn't seem to do much since all the strong pesticidees were outlawed a few years ago.

[johnny7]

Gasoline... its what's for dinner.

[stm]

And like wasps, the stinger on a yellow jacket is smooth (or very slightly barbed) so they can pull it out (without disembowling themselves like a honeybee) and sting you again. Like I said, nasty buggers.

[sinkspur]

....having no purpose, swarming in large irritating groups, likes to run your fun etc.

Yellow jackets are, like all wasps, very beneficial at keeping down the populations of beetles, caterpillars, and other damaging insects.

Typically, they won't do anything unless their nest is disturbed.

I heard a story on a local news program that wasp venom is being studied and tested as a pain reliever for severe cases of arthritis, with some success.

So, they're not totally worthless.

[RandallFlagg]

I'm with ya. A Zippo and a can of Lysol. Burn off their wings and stomp away.

Perhaps we could breed Praying Mantids to wipe out herds of 'em. Then we can train 'em to defend our political yard signs.

[wbill]

The folks who want to be kind to yellow jackets must be the equivalent of the un-mugged liberal.

Pretty much. Sites talked about how much good they do (they eat other bugs, apparently) and how eco-friendly they are. Also, the sites showed how to build traps for catch and release (are you kidding????) so that the little %#%#!!s self-esteem didn't get hurt too much.

I wound up finding 2 nests in my yard...must be a bad year. A can of bee-bopper into each of them, and 1/2 a can of Sevin dust at the entrance cleaned them out in good shape.

[kenth]

In a last-ditch effort, Steve Garvin duct-taped several pieces of wood together and attached a metal fork to the end. The siblings climbed into Joyce's car and rolled down a window, covering the opening with a vinyl screen. Steve manned the improvised yellow-jacket-nest remover; Joyce took the wheel.

They drove the car forward to the mobile home's edge, scraped off a large chunk of nest and accelerated down the street. The yellow jackets buzzed the car for four blocks.

Ahhhh.... American Disingenuity!

On another note, I hate the buggers. My wife stepped on an opening to an underground yellow jacket nest a month ago. She got stung about ten times before she could make it to the house. The opening was the size of a quarter, and I dumped three cans of wasp spray into it. The grass around the nest died, and it showed to be almost three feet across. This hot and dry weather here has brought out the worst of the stinging insects.

[Iscool]

I dumped a bag of Seven dust over an entrance hole one night...Never saw a yellow jacket from that nest again...Don't know if they died, or just got annoyed and moved out...

[HeartlandOfAmerica]

Well, sheesh. if it's that big, just tear up the floorboards and set one ofthose industrial strength lawn mowers over the entrance hole, then let 'er rip.

Leave it set til the thing runs out of gas and see who wins the man vs insect fight ;)

then go after the queen

[AnAmericanMother]

I'm a beekeeper (we hate yellow jackets and wasps worse than anybody else - they give our good little girls a bad name), so I'd ask you to please go easy on the Sevin dust or at least clean it up or put a shovelful of dirt on it after the job is done.

Sevin is extremely persistent, and if bees get into it they take it back to the hive and ALL the bees die. So beekeepers don't like Sevin very much . . .

[kenth]

Oh yeah, that's good stuff. We were infested with scorpions one year and that was the only stuff that worked. The only thing other sprays did was make them more poisonous....

[hellinahandcart]

one of the really neat ways to get rid of them is to invert a large glass bowl over the entrance

That's kinda how I found a yellow jacket nest, shortly after being carried over the threshold a couple summers ago.

I was weeding, I had a bucket with me to throw the weeds into, I was just about halfway through the flowerbed, and I moved the bucket down to the end, intending to weed my way over to it. Husband calls from the front yard, I go see what he wants, come right back. I then see what looks like a giant ball of bees all around the bucket. Like magic, I am suddenly back in the front yard telling sauropod "Honey, we have a big problem!" :D

He went and moved the bucket with a shovel, and all those yellow jackets went underground, like water down a sink. I had covered up their entrance with the bucket, and so they just piled up around it. There was probably just as big a traffic jam inside waiting to get out. I am glad I didn't accidentally kneel on it while weeding. The hole was only about an inch across, but it was right in my path.

I watched the yellow jackets come and go for a few days. On Day 1 it was just one in, one out every ten seconds or so. By Day 2 it was every second. By Day 3, it was like a yellow jacket tornado. Those things breed faster than flies.

We waited until after dark and dumped about half a bag of Sevin powder down the hole. The next day, we collapsed the hole. It was rebuilt within the week. We repeated with the Sevin and that time it got all of them.

[hellinahandcart]

Oh, man, don't wait til winter. I read on a website that the nest size increases exponentially. They may lift the roof off your house by fall. :D