-- Rob Carr
Posted on 08/24/2006 6:52:04 AM PDT by Sopater
MOBILE -- To the bafflement of insect experts, gigantic yellow jacket nests have started turning up in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.
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| 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. |
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-- Rob Carr
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Auburn University entomologists, who say they've never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama's Black Belt.
At one site in Barbour County, the nest was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, said Andy McLean, an Orkin pesticide service manager in Dothan who helped remove it from an abandoned barn about a month ago.
"It was one of the largest ones we've seen," McLean said.
Attached to two walls and under the slab, the nest had to be removed in sections, McLean said.
Entomologist Dr. Charles Ray at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System in Auburn said he's aware of about 16 of what he described as "super-sized" nests in south Alabama.
Ray said he's seen 10 of them and cautioned people about going near them because of the yellow jacket's painful sting.
The largest nest Ray has inspected this year filled the interior of a weathered 1955 Chevrolet parked in a rural Elmore County barn. That nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago, but quickly spread to fill the entire vehicle, the property owner, Harry Coker, said. Four satellite nests around it have gotten into the eaves of the barn, about 300 yards from his home.
"I'm kind of afraid for the grandkids. I had to sneak down there at dark and get my tractor out of the barn," Coker said. "It's been a disruption."
Coker said he may wait until a winter freeze to try to remove the nest.
In previous years, a yellow jacket nest was no larger than a basketball, Ray said. It would contain about 3,000 workers and one queen. These gigantic nests may have as many as 100,000 workers and multiple queens.
Without a cold winter to kill them this year, the yellow jackets continued feeding in January and February -- and layering their nests made of paper, not wax. They typically are built in shallow underground cavities.
Yellow jackets, often confused with bees, may visit flowers for sugar, but unlike bees, yellow jackets are carnivorous, eating insects, carrion and picnic food, according to scientists. "They were able to find food to colony through the winter," Ray said in a telephone interview.
He investigated a nest near Pineapple, measuring about 5 feet by 4 feet, that was coming out of the ground on a roadside. A southwest Pike County house in Goshen had a giant nest spreading into its roof.
Goshen Mayor G. Malon Johnson said he consulted Ray in removing it because he was concerned that children playing nearby could be attacked.
A colony has a maximum size in early July and August. The hot, dry conditions could force the yellow jackets out of ground nests.
"Normally it starts declining in the fall," Ray said.
He said the "super colonies" appear to have many queens.
"We're not really sure how this multiple queen thing works," Ray said. "It could be that the daughters of the original queen don't leave the nest or that the queens have developed some way to cooperate."
Ray examined a collected nest from Macon County to count the queens in it.
"We found 12 queens so far, so that's definitely a factor," Ray said Thursday.
Dr. Michael D. Goodisman, a biologist at Georgia Tech who has studied large nests in Australia, said he's heard of some large ones in Georgia and Florida, but not as big as those in Alabama.A 6-foot by 3-foot nest on a pond stump in Bulloch County, Ga., was featured July 12 on CNN.
"I'm not sure people know what triggers it," he said.
U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist James H. Cane said he's familiar with a nest in Florida 10 or 15 years ago that engulfed a big easy chair. Cane said the monster nests reported in Alabama are intriguing and agreed with Ray that they could be the product of multiple queens in a single nest.
The nest usually dies out each year. "All that overwinters is the future queen," he said.
Given a queen's egg-laying rate, he said, there's no way a nest with a single queen could get that big in a growing season.
But in a multiple-queen colony, Cane said, there must be space where queens can't get at each other.
The dawn strips all the oils off of the wasps body. Without their body oils the water and soap fills their pores and they drown.
Nice and quiet without poison or expense! Works of red wasps too!
And the polar bears are the canaries in the cage. First they shrink, then.... Well, you know.
More tax money down the crapper.
Well, I live in NYS where everything is regulated up the wazoo...
Yellow Jackets feed on honeybees. They are active at a lower temperterure than honeybees. A large fall population of yellow jackets will destroy honeybee colonies.
"Dawn dishwashing detergent does wonders! Greatly dilute it with water. Pour onto nest at dusk, or sunrise."
This really does the job!
Just get bigger skunks.
Use gasoline. My dad used it to commit yellow-jacket genocide many times while I was a kid in rural Alabama. The Yellow-jackets die on impact and it's still cheaper than the damn pesticides.
>Yellow Jackets feed on honeybees. They are active at a lower temperterure than honeybees. A large fall population of yellow jackets will destroy honeybee colonies.<
But, as the honeybee population dwindles, do yellowjackets take their place? Yellowjackets don't depend on honeybees as their only food source.
Eeewwwwww ... creepy.
Wow, you freepers are slippin'! This whole thread and no one realizes that these nests are because of Bush and Global Warming?
I HATE Yellow jackets. I can see no useful purpose for these pests. Another reason not to move South...just don't let those multi-queen suckers move up here. September is bad enough with these things hovering the garbage cans. C'mon first frost!
I once ran over an inground nest with a lawnmover and they let me have it. The mower stayed right there, running away until it ran out of gas after a couple of hours. Retrieval was a delicate operation. Nowadays with the price of gas, I might make an attempt to turn it off! LOL.
Damn good idea... I wonder how big a Shop Vac they'd need for the nests we read about here?
A gathering of Jihadist Wasps. No doubt it is all Bush' fault.
ROFL!!!
Whatever you do, do it when the sun is not up. If you attack a nest during the day, the workers will come after you, and will hang around the nest for days afterward wondering what to do next, and making it impossible to get near them. I just hope that one of those monster nests doesn't turn up in my back yard. Some of those nests in the article are pretty close to me.
>>> That nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago, but quickly spread to fill the entire vehicle, the property owner, Harry Coker, said>>>
OMG!!!
I read the other day about the lady who's mobile home floor was bucking from a growing next that took up the whole end of her trailer. I had a hornets nest the size of three basketballs year before last (I'm in middle Georgia) and you couldn't even walk outside without getting divebombed. I had to call a bee keeper who had a bee suit to come spray it and knock it down. He kept the nest (for whatever reason, novelty I guess).
Neat Idea!, Thanks!
Yellow jackets eat honeybees. I've seen one yellow jacket kill 15 or 20 bees while raiding one of my hives.
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