Anyone else notice an uptick in wasps/hornets? I have never really been afraid or quick to kill nests. I normally leave them alone and they do the same. In my past life I owned a pest control company and dealt with them a lot and I can say I never got stung. This year I’ve been stung twice. Once in my dang house sitting in my recliner. It must have gotten in through my sliding glass doors and once on my deck after I saw them entering my wife’s potting bench. Upon closer inspection, I found another nest under my barbecue. Both of those areas are waay too close to let them stay and I for sure didn’t want my wife getting stung. A day after I sprayed both nests, I went out to physically remove them and when I opened the drawer on the bench, there was a survivor who got me. My daughter said that at her farm they are terrible and are nesting on the gates to the fields she opens every day and are thick in the barns.

We live in a mostly rural area—surrounded by woods, and insects are part of the package. For a while we had a decent population of wasps—paper wasps, I think, judging by the type and size of the nests they build in nearby trees. A couple of years ago we started hanging suet for the birds, mostly pileated woodpeckers. Before we started feeding them, we would see a couple a year. Now there are 'several,' including new families in and around our property. Since the woodpecker population increase, the wasps population is almost zero.

Woodpeckers (including Pileateds and their smaller cousins like Downy Woodpeckers and Northern Flickers) view a paper wasp nest as a high-protein buffet. During the spring and summer, the nests are packed with fat, nutritious wasp larvae and pupae. A woodpecker will confidently land on or near a nest, hammer it apart with its chisel-like beak, and use its long, sticky, barbed tongue to extract the larvae from the comb cells.

Even if the woodpeckers don't eat every single larva, the sheer physical trauma they inflict on the nests is devastating. If a nest is repeatedly targeted and torn open, the surviving adult wasps will often realize the location is unsafe, give up on the site, and abandon it entirely to try and rebuild elsewhere.

By hanging suet, we successfully established a reliable, high-energy food source that encouraged these birds to establish territories and raise new families right around our property. Because they are spending so much more time actively patrolling our trees and foraging locally, the local paper wasps simply don't stand a chance.

It's a fantastic win-win: the suet brought the wood-boring specialists to our yard, and as a bonus, they completely cleared out our wasp problem.

Something to consider.

Good Luck

A-Jay

We have every North American species of woodpecker at our house including the pileated. We don’t have any wasp nests that hang in the trees. We have the white faced terrors that build nests in awnings, and inside things like potting bench and barbecue well away from prying beaks. We have the smaller ground bees on out hillside below the addition. We also have ground wasps that are pretty mean and we had a huge nest get behind our siding next to a chimney on the roof. Had our pest control guy take care of that one. The size of that nest was revealed when we had the new roof installed this spring. Not to mention the Cicada Killers that swarm the outside lights that are as big as sparrows. I have no idea where they nest. I’m pretty used to the numbers but this year is seems to be way worse.

Yellow Jackets inflict much pain.

Beware

19 hours ago, TOXIC said:

Not to mention the Cicada Killers that swarm the outside lights that are as big as sparrows. I have no idea where they nest.

Cicada Killers are solitary wasps. The females dig a hole in the ground, put a cicada in it, lay an egg on the cicada, cover up the hole, then repeat . They need to be large to enable them to hunt down the cicadas. Most solitary wasps sting only as a last resort.