In article , Larry Blanchard
wrote:

In article ,
says...
that's beautiful. thank you.

Yes it is. But EV doesn't have a hedge full of yellow jackets and an
allergic wife - I do :-).

I've tried traps and spray cans - Orkin is getting called Monday.

First off, I'm curious, does Orkin come out after midnight? Because if the
nest is assaulted in the daylight hours, most of the wasps won't be in it,
& it will take ghastly amounts of extra-poisonous toxins sprayed more
places than just the nest to get rid of them, & if there is ever going to
be a good chance of anyone getting stung by generally-innocuous wasps, it
will be while the Orkin dude is screwing around the nest.

Yellowjackets are gardeners' friends, as they eat garden-chomping insects.
A single yellow-jacket nest in a garden will be cleaning out aphids,
leafhoppers, beetle larvae, flies, & all manner of garden-munchers at a
fantastic rate. They also disperse trillium seeds, which imitate a meat or
insect odor that causes yellowjackets to cart away the seeds & drop them
elsewhere when they figure out it isn't meat.

Paperwasps abandon their nest after a single use, so their nesting
presence is temporary. If it WERE necessary to move one it could be
wrapped in plastic at night & carted away, as none of the colony will be
outside the nest at night; poisoning would not be necessary.

I've known many people who had serious even life-threatening allergies to
bees or wasps, but none thought the best way to deal with it was to poison
the garden & inevitably their pets, their kids, themselves, & all the
beneficial insects in the vicinity. My grampa had a bee allergy sufficient
that he kept a kit handy in case he was stung, but that didn't keep
great-grampa from keeping honeybees, & while my life overlapped grampa's,
he was never stung that I knew of & never had to use the kit.

Wasps don't have to be nesting in the garden to be in the garden; you'd
have to poison all the surrounding yards if their mere presence incited
such a phobia. The best way to deal with them is personal calmness. You
could offer wasps a greasy chunck of fried chicken & let them crawl all
over your hand in great numbers & the happy little buggers would never
sting you (they might accidentally nibble you if your fingers are greasy
enough to be mistaken for the meat). You could brush them off your
shoulder or off your sandwich with the back of your hand & they wouldn't
sting, though they might dart over your hand to get back on the sandwich.

At a recent lakefront gathering for a Golden Anniversary party, the
primary picnic area had a large colony of ground-wasps nearby. Grandkids &
great-grandkids of all ages were running around; people were eating
shitloads of meat; & the wasps were truly a nuisance trying to get their
share of the food. But even with a dozen rowdy kids running about, &
everyone's hands shooing wasps away from food, not one person was stung, &
the only complaint became that meat-eaters had to go indoors to finish
their meals in peace. I'd frankly still like to get rid of that particular
nest if meat was going to be eaten around there regularly, but it would
never be an allergy issue because those critters wouldn't even sting the
kids who were testing the limits of wasp docility.

They're not highly aggressive. I have lived around yellow jacket nests for
half a century & have never been stung by a paperwasp or ground
yellowjacket. I was once stung by a mud-dobber, but that was because I
leaned against it by accident & it was trying to get loose; mud-dobber
wasps ordinarily won't sting under any circumstance, their stinger being
for hunting much more than defense; they don't even defend their little
mud-nests. As a kid I once laid down under a swarm after a paperwasp nest
had had rocks chucked at it. Several of us kids lay perfectly still &
watched the swarm. At their angriest still it was a cinch not to got
stung.

Ground-dwelling & paper-nest wasps are only aggressive when their nests
are mucked with, so the best way to deal with them is by marking the
location noticeably & giving them some space. Nearly all wasp attacks are
the fault of people attacking the nest, even with freezing aerosols &
pesticides the wasps can still manage to be defensive as death is not
instantaneous. When their nest isn't mucked with, they're very easy to
live with.

There are two understandable reasons to not tolerate a nest; allergy is
not one of them since there'll still be plenty of wasps from elsewhere
nearby. But if a paper nest is built right outside the door, the mere
opening & closing of the door could make the colony feel threatened, so it
would have to be zapped at night with freeze-spray, wrapped in plastic, &
taken away (we had one on our front porch for a season however & the wasps
were so little trouble we failed to notice the papernest on the ceiling
until after the season was over & the nest was abandoned). The second
reason they might not be tolerated is for nesting right by a bar-b-cue or
picnic site. Although not apt to sting they can be so happy about all the
meat people are bringing to them that they will descend dozens at a time
onto every picnic plate & make it hard to eat in peace. If becoming
vegetarian isn't an option, then the picnic-site nest won't be very
tolerable.

But if one is lucky enough to have a nest in a corner of the garden where
one needn't be digging, or high in a tree where the colony is never
threatened, it should be cause for thanks, as they are assisting the
garden every minute they are active.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com