Yellowjackets have bright, shiny yellow with black stripes, slim,
with no 'fur'. Honeybees have fatter bodies, duller stripes, are
rather fat and fuzzy looking, and are getting extremely rare around
here.
Yellowjackets are related to wasps and hornets. Their nests are paper,
often underground, and there is no honey. Also, they don't have
barbed stingers, so they can sting over and over, unlike honeybees
which sting once, and leave their barbed stinger along with their
innards behind ....

We killed a huge nest of 'em in our yard a year or two ago, as I
reported on this list. Went out at night with a flashlight and large
glass bowl, sprayed the entrance hole for a good 5 seconds with a
heavy-duty hornet killer, and covered it with the bowl. Next day there
were hundreds of dead yellowjackets around the entrance, including one
or two queens. No survivors. A few nights later, some critter (possum
or coon) dug up the nest, perhaps looking for larvae to eat... I could
not believe how huge the nest was, with big slabs of paper
constructions and thousands of chambers containing dead larvae. The
whole thing has since sunk in, creating a depression in the lawn that
I'll have to fill in one of these days...

If you manage to kill off your nest, I expect the ants will carry away
the remains eventually.

Sue
Sue

On 26 Aug 2005 07:58:37 -0700, "meexie" wrote:

I have the same problem. The one thing that worries be is that where
there's a hive, there should be honey. Even If I kill the bees, I need
to remove the hive, or have a huge ant problem later.

So should I spray, wait, and then pull off the siding to get to the
hive?