Perhaps we could breed Praying Mantids to wipe out herds of 'em. Then we can train 'em to defend our political yard signs.
Posted on 08/22/2006 8:21:29 AM PDT by Marius3188
FORT MITCHELL, Ala. - Brian Province and Don Simmons have made money killing critters for a long time.
When they got a call last month about an unusually large yellow jacket nest at 53 McLendon Road in Fort Mitchell, Ala., they expected something roughly the size of a license plate -- the biggest they had ever seen.
What they found was a gray, papier-mâché-like mass the size of a car hood attached to the bottom of Annie Garvin's mobile home. That nest is only a few feet from a fig tree in her backyard.
Garvin's mobile home -- one of few on her street -- sits on a small grassy lot in a row of new homes a couple of miles off Highway 165.
Before she noticed the nest about three months ago, the 74-year-old woman would walk around the outside of her home at least twice a day for exercise. Sometimes she would go back there for a snack.
"I'd be out there eatin' figs. I'd go out there and eat them off the tree," Garvin said.
She hasn't eaten a single fig this summer. In fact, she doesn't even know if there are any left on the tree.
"I'm not going out there
foolin' with it. Not while they're around there," she said.
Shock and awe
When the two exterminators first arrived on the scene, "... both our mouths dropped," Province said.
Together, Province and Simmons have more than 20 years' experience working for different outfits. Now, they're joint owners of PSI Services, a Columbus contracting company that also provides pest and wildlife control services in Alabama.
The nest they found could house as many as 200,000 yellow jackets, the duo estimated, although they stress they aren't entomologists. They just kill the bugs.
"This is the largest one either one of us has ever seen," Province said, standing just a few feet behind the mobile home, where the nest hung beneath the sagging floor.
And that was just the tip.
Most of the nest, they say, is below ground. Judging by the chunk attached to the home, they estimate it could be 20-30 feet long.
All that is visible of that section is a basketball-sized hole in the ground under the home.
Province held out his right hand, forming a circle the size of a peach pit with his index finger and thumb. "Usually an entrance hole for a yellow jacket nest is about this big," he said
The battle begins
The floor above the nest had been damaged years ago, so Garvin's adult children, Steve Garvin and Joyce Joycecq , cut a slit in the carpet and tried to poke the nest off the home by pushing a branch through the particle board. It didn't work, but one yellow jacket got inside and stung Annie Garvin on the side of her nose.
They pushed a funnel into the floor. Down went bug killer, then a deadly mix of bleach and ammonia.
The yellow jackets remained.
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.
"They were swirling around the car. They were like little pellets attacking the car," Joyce said.
Joyce, who lives in Columbus, took Annie Garvin to stay at her house for three days until the yellow jackets calmed.
"Nothing we did seemed to be doing anything to them," Joyce said.
They gave up and called PSI.
Province sprayed the nest on July 14 and again on July 16.
Province said he expected to finish off the rest today with a final spray. After the colony is wiped out, he and Simmons plan to put the nest on display at Do it Yourself Pest Control Products -- a Columbus shop with which they do business.
"We want this nest bad," Province said.
Overgrown yellow jacket nests like the one at Annie Garvin's home have been appearing throughout southern Alabama and Georgia this year.Entomologists are pointing their fingers at the weather as the cause of the phenomenon.
Inside the nest
Here's how it's supposed to work: Only queen yellow jackets in a colony survive the winter. The queen sleeps until spring, then looks for a place to begin a new nest and lay the first eggs of the colony.
"What we think is going on here is they're not dying off," said Dan Suiter, associate professor of entomology at the University of Georgia's College of Agriculture campus in Griffin.
That means colonies from last year added to their nests through the winter and into this year. Many ended up with multiple -- sometimes dozens -- of queens.
Mild winters are nothing special around here, but entomologist Charles Ray, a research fellow at Auburn University, said all it takes to destroy a colony is a few days of near-freezing temperatures.
"We never had -- growing up in the South -- what you would call a cold snap," he said.
Although Ray hasn't found time yet to visit Garvin's nest, he said Province and Simmons' 200,000 estimate is extremely high and would make it larger than any nest he has ever examined.
Although experts believe they have a handle on what is causing the giant nests, Ray said the mystery is far from solved.
"There are still more questions than answers," Ray said.
they eat fire ants. I seen 'em.
It involves slow and I presume painful death for the little b@$+@&ds. That's good enough for me!
I agree, I love bees and they serve a great purpose.
Cool, informative site about yellow jackets.
http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC2510.htm
Sort of like the pit bulls of the bug world?
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.
The "don't harm nature's creatures" attitude lasts until the first time they get stung, then out comes the gasoline and matches.
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.
Gasoline... its what's for dinner.
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.
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.
Perhaps we could breed Praying Mantids to wipe out herds of 'em. Then we can train 'em to defend our political yard signs.
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.
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...
Leave it set til the thing runs out of gas and see who wins the man vs insect fight ;)
then go after the queen
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 . . .
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....
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.
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