Wasps

Wasps are a serious pest and can cause structural damage as well as the obvious risk of stinging. We have 3 main types, The common English wasp vespa vespa, the German Wasp vespa germanica and the Hornet vespa giganticus.

Wasps are a huge part of our business, in a good wasp year we can treat hundreds of wasp nests a week, we think that whether or not it will be a good wasp year (bad for you) is entirely dependent upon 2 things and they both have to happen together, a warm spring with no cold weather from late March onwards and an abundant small insect population like aphids, greenfly and black fly that the wasps can use to feed the larvae on, if these 2 things happen together then a bumper wasp season is on the way.

All wasp nests start from one single Queen wasp who hibernates over winter and appears or wakes up in the spring. She proceeds to build a small golf ball sized nest and in that lays 6 eggs, when these eggs hatch into larvae she forages and feeds them herself until they hatch into worker wasps (infertile females) The Queen then retreats to the nest and becomes an egg laying machine and the workers do the feeding and building, the more that hatch and become adults the more can build and feed so that eventually the nest becomes massive, with an English wasp nest capable of having 50,000 wasps resident when it hits its peak (German 10,000, Hornets 5,000) once the nest has reached its peak
they start to think about next year and produce some males (drones) and fertile females, in an English wasp nest this can be as many as 2000, they eventually go off on their own separately and hibernate and the whole process starts again the following Spring with the old nest, workers, drones and old queen all dying off sometime during the Autumn or winter.

Wasps unlike bees build an outside structure to their nest using chewed and masicated wood stripped off untreated areas of wood within your garden, when there are lots of workers present these nests can become monstrous in size, with the occasional one reaching the size of a small car or 3 seater sofa, beachball and wheelbarrow sized nests are very common. Whilst building these nests if they start to run out of space wasps have a great set of teeth (which they often use to kill insects and tear meat off corpses to feed their larvae) They can use these teeth to enlarge the space for their nest and chew through plaster as if it was butter ! It’s very common for wasps to chew through ceilings and walls if not dealt with promptly.

Dealing with wasps should always be left to professionals, wasps can multiple sting and with so many in each nest the risk is far too great to attempt it yourself, pest control professionals like Pestbusters have instant kill products available to us that are not available over the shelf our tip is to never attempt to treat a wasp nest yourself.