Your Wasps ..Dead..Quick!
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About wasps
Wasps are semi-social insects. This means that for part of their life-cycle the live in a mutually dependent colony.
There are about fifty different species in the UK some are solitary. The most frightening is the hornet which is big with black and orange markings. Another is the common wasp which has extreme black and yellow markings.
The workers are attracted to sweet foods for themselves, although they must also find protein-based foods to take to the growing larvae.
What happens during our visit?
You will need to tell us where the nest is in order for us to quote accurately and treat effectively.
Our technician will attend your property at the arranged time, and using specialised equipment will pump an insecticide dust into the centre of the wasp nest.
The technician will ask you to keep away from the nest while he is working for your own safety. He will be kitted out in all the right safety gear.
The insecticide we use will evaporate away after a few days leaving a harmless chalk dust.
What if the Wasps Come Back?
We guarantee the treatment will be effective for the rest of the calendar year.
Wasps never uses the same nest twice because of a build up of parasites in it. However, they might use the same location again so it is worth proofing the entry hole to prevent this possibility.
Why are they such a problem?
Wasps can and do sting and it is very painful. However they rarely do this early on in the year and don’t often become a nuisance until the queens leave and the workers desert the nest. There is a view that the now redundant workers become aggressive to deter predators generally and ensure a higher survival rate amongst the new queens.
Life cycle
The life cycles of the social wasps are very similar and roughly follow this pattern:
In the spring a queen wakes up from hibernation when she feels the air temperature rise.
She flies around looking for a nest site. Something with a hole big enough to make a nest of one cubic foot or larger. These can be in the ground although they will use holes in trees and lofts in houses.
She flies round flowers and plants collecting both insects and grubs and in the nest, constructs a small golf-ball sized nest with a circle of paper cells hanging down inside it, laying an egg in each.
When the eggs hatch, she feeds the grubs on insects until they pupate, hatch and then assist her by flying out and collecting insects for food and wood fibres for the nest paper.
The nest gradually grows throughout the spring and early summer until it is a mass of paper concealing layers of horizontal cells and looking between the size of a grapefruit and a beach ball. The larger number of workers means that a lot of food energy is coming into the nest and the size of the hatching workers keeps increasing.
Eventually they stop producing workers and produce instead a new set of queens and drones. These fly out, mate and the drones die. The old queen and nest die off too.
The new queens spend the rest of the summer feeding on insects and at nectaries in flowers and putting on fat to see themselves through the winter. When the temperature drops they seek a sheltered place to hibernate through the winter.
The process starts all over again the following spring. Not all will make it through the winter or are successful at starting new colonies. Wasps will not return to an old nest therefore treated nests can remain in place and pose no risk of becoming inhabited again.
