The end is nigh!
"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."
That's a lot of Georgia Tech fans.
The end is nigh!
Ouch.
(Check your backyard....)
A yellow jacket nest engulfs the inside of a 1955 Chevrolet
on Harry Coker's Tallassee property on Thursday.
Gigantic yellow jacket nests have been found in
old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground
cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.
It's Bush's fault!
Holy comoly.
Yes, I had one of these monster nests (underground as usual for true yellow jackets) which was far bigger than imagined. All we could see was the entrance -- a hole about 3" in diameter. There was a natural cavity, which they found and built in it over the period of a year or so. Think naively that I could just put a road flare on a long rod and push it down the hole in daylight turned out to be a big mistake -- a painful mistake. Once I learned that you WAIT until they are all in the nest at night, then you hit them with a flare, and it gets them all.
Once we dug up the nest it was about 2 feet square -- just huge. So beware --- always go after them at night --- :-)
Ping
We have a good hard freeze every year (we're way north of Ft. Mitchell - my dad's family originally came from that area) so they don't overwinter here. But they're still a royal pain. Some people pour gasoline down the burrows, but one of the really neat ways to get rid of them is to invert a large glass bowl over the entrance. They can't get out to forage, and since they CAN get out and they can see daylight, they don't dig another entrance, they just starve. I like the suffering aspect of it (I REALLY hate yellow jackets.)
Sheesh.
Bunker bust it.
>>>"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. >>>
They said the same thing in the Spalding Co paper. Even though there is a drought (not much water to breed into), there are massive amounts of misquitos down here this year. We haven't had a hard winter in a LONG time.
Never tried it though.....
I was stung by a small hive about the size of a license plate. I ran past it about 4 feet away, and somehow upset them and they attacked.
Must've been more than a few dozen stings on my back, more on my arms, and a few around my neck and upper chest.
Fortunately I'm neither allergic or sensitive to wasp or bee stings, and after a couple hours I was fine. But wasps, especially yellow jackets, and bees give me the willies. It hurt like crazy right after it happened.
My father ran over a yellowjacket nest with a bushhog once. It's the only time I ever saw that man run (and he left the tractor running, for obvious reasons). He got lucky to only take about 10-15 stings while ran the 150 yards back to the house.
And, my older brother had a somewhat interesting method for dealing with a nest one time (yellowjackets or some sort of ground-dwelling bee, I forget which) in the family garden. He went out at dusk, poured a bunch of gasoline down the hole...then stood back a little ways and started shooting .223 tracer rounds at the hole until the gas fumes exploded. It blew a chunk the size of a dinner plate out of the ground, and took care of the nest quite effectively.
I wonder if that poor woman is going to be able to live in that trailer with the sheer amount of insecticide they had to use to kill off that nest.
}:-)4
Cool, informative site about yellow jackets.
http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC2510.htm
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.