Politics from the Palouse to Puget Sound

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Kill Those Yellowjackets

At the conclusion of a three hour bike ride yesterday, I stopped at a friend's house and found at least 5 yellowjacket queens flying around his yard. It's time to put out the traps.


The first decent day since early last fall brought out the yellowjackets. And that makes this is the time to make your neighborhoods more habitable. Except for the queens, the entire yellowjacket colony dies off for the winter. The queens emerge in the spring to start new colonies. When they come out of hibernation they are hungry. Put out traps now and each queen you catch will reduce late summer's yellowjacket population by 5000.

Here's a reminder for how best to get those beasts. Buy a good yellowjacket trap. I like those bile-colored "Rescue" brand traps best.

Use the attractant that comes with the trap and hang the trap in an area where you have a sun/shade boundary - a tree on an outlying branch works well. You can make your trap more appealing by adding a source of free water too. I hang cans cut in half next to my traps.

Your trap won't fill up with yellowjackets because there just aren't many this time of year. But everyone you get will make a big difference for your summer.

5 comments:

April E. Coggins said...

Be sure to do it today. The weather forecast is predicting a high of 47 tomorrow and snow/rain by next weekend.

Scotty said...

I found one cruising around my Toyota. It is yellow and black. It is called the Bumblebee. And I swear other bee's love to make nests in it.

While I was outside the bee that was flying around it, I would have to assume the queen bee, was probably thinking it was an attractive spot. I however disagree and took care of her highness...

Paul E. Zimmerman said...

Pyrethroids are our friends.

Michael said...

Well, my body count for the weekend was - zero. In fact I didn't even see a yellowjacket around my house and only one paper wasp.

I wonder why there was such a difference between Colfax and Pullman this weekend? I saw at least 5 yellowjackets and one paper wasp in my friend's yard Saturday.

Maybe I've just been so efficient at hymenopteric genocide these last few years that I've created a yellowjacket free zone around my house.

Satanic Mechanic said...

The bodycount in the Satanic Mechanic Empire is up. I killed many wasps and a raccoon.
I torched the overgrowth around my creek and came upon a few nests. Luckily, my Wal-Mart wasp/hornet killer spray nuked them. In addition to the four traps I usually have up, I put up five more around the house, shop and barn.
While working on the John Deere, I saw three raccoons running across the road and into a drainage pipe. I scared them when I started up the "Overlord". I grabbed my trusty SKS (the one with the anti-tank grenade launcher), went to the opening of the drainage pipe and fired a round into the pipe. Only two raccoons came out the other end and fled into the nearby silos of my neighbor's property.
Well I have a new enemy besides the wasps and coyotes, raccoons!