Control Wasp Population?

[CliveHive]

I'm planning my 2nd hive about 350 miles from the house, so it will be several weeks between visits.
"The Farm" is rural, and has a 15 acre field at the entrance that sprouts goldenrod in the spring before
 settling down to produce coastal Bermuda hay for the rest of the growing season.

I am trying to anticipate and head-off potential problems - - - for instance I have coyotes, wild pigs and
racoons running around (lots of each) and I have read some good suggestions on how to deal with each
of them.  But - - - I also have quite a few wasps in the out buildings.  Yes. I can (and do) spray them, which
 is pretty effective.  They are nasty little critters - - - protective of their nests, and quick to dive and sting if
you get too close - - they have reddish-brown and yellow striped abdomens - - red-orange head - -
painful sting - - - Central Texas wasps, as opposed to the darker Yankee wasps of my youth - - -

Question:  Is there anything that can be done to keep wasps out of or away from the hive?  I understand
keeping the entrance narrow - - - anything else?  Wasp traps?  Wasp excluders?  Anything? 
pro-active

[bwallace23350]

I am interested in this just because of my general dislike of wasps. I get stung once or twice every year and once even got stung inside my mouth. Nasty creatures and a nasty sting, especially in the mouth.

[little john]

On the assumption that your wasps are the same as common-or-garden European wasps - one effective way of dealing with them is to put out traps.

Now these traps can be fancy affairs, or they can simply be made from 2 litre plastic Cola bottles (cut the top 4" or so off, then invert the top and press it back into the bottle, to form a funnel.  Then add a few inches of anything sweet - like Cola, Orange Juice, or jam dissolved in water.)

But - PLACEMENT OF THESE TRAPS IS CRITICAL.

To understand this - wasps are like honeybees, insomuch as they send out scouts - and returning scouts will trigger a feeding frenzy if they are successful in their scouting missions.

So - do NOT place traps close to your beehives - that's the equivalent of advertising.  The best place for traps is 100 feet or more DOWNWIND of the apiary, as wasp scouts will approach the apiary from that direction, as they sense and follow the honeybee scent plume.

Successful traps are NOT those filled with hundreds of unlucky wasps - anyone who thinks so is fooling themselves.  Ideally, what you want to see is just a handful of (scout) wasps in the traps, and no wasps at all bothering the beehives.  It's the absence of wasps around your hives which is an indication that your traps are working, not how many have been drowned.

But - doesn't the direction of 'downwind' change from time to time ? Yes - and that's a nuisance, but it's something that has to be dealt with.  So - make your traps easily portable, and change their position (keeping them always downwind of the hives), whenever there's a change in the wind direction.

Last thing - if you have fruit trees, ensure that any windfalls are swept up, as any fruit left on the ground to rot will soon become a 'wasp magnet'.

LJ

[GSF]

bwallace, If you want to get yellow jackets do the same thing except use tuna fish. Bees don't like meat.

[CliveHive]

Great stuff, Little John.  Just what I was hunting for.  That is easy enough to do.  I will follow your instructions and let you know how it works out.

As a matter of general interest  - - I saw (and killed) two  strange looking  - - insects - - that I took to be wasp queens that were walking around
on my garage floor at the farm the evening after I had sprayed a nest under the eaves and mostly hidden from view.  They were very long - -
longer than a bee queen, and the wings were long, almost to the end of the abdomen.  The head and joint connecting the head and abdomen
were light colored orange-yellow like the wasps - - but there was no swarm or attendants - - is that the way wasps behave?? 

Thanks all

[little john]

The sum total of my knowledge about wasps was the above - plus I knew that the queen hibernates on her own - as from time to time I've found hibernating queens in my sawdust bins, and in stacks of the hessian sacking I sometimes use as emergency hive insulation.  But - I had no idea of how she gets a colony 'up and running' in the spring ...

So - it's been live and learn time for me this morning - and this is what I've discovered:

Wasps (vespula vulgaris)

The annual cycle of the wasp begins in the spring when a single queen wakes from hibernation and begins to build a nest from chewed wood pulp and plant debris mixed with saliva ? pretty much like the substance we call paper. This is the place where she will lay her eggs, which she does one by one, each egg going into a cell in the nest.

The eggs begin to hatch into sterile females or workers which take over the function of increasing the size of the nest and looking after the larvae. All the queen does from then on is lay more eggs. By a normal July [in the UK] she will have produced enough worker wasps for them to take over the maintenance of the nest and feeding the eggs. In the autumn, those eggs develop into males (known as drones) and fertile females. These leave the nest and mate. The fertilised females ? the new queens ? then hibernate until the next spring while the founder queen, the males and all the workers die and the original nest becomes deserted.

Various factors can restrict population numbers. Unlike bees wasps are carnivorous. They hunt for other insects (and if they didn?t exist, gardeners would have far more aphids and greenfly to deal with). In wet summers there are fewer of these tiny insects around, which is bad news for wasps. Cold winters can be quite good for hibernating insects because it means they hibernate properly. But a warm spring followed by another cold snap can be disastrous if the queen comes out of hibernation too quickly.

Enlightenment - I had no idea that our common wasps were carnivorous too, so that might change the bait used in my traps, if jam should ever stop working ...

LJ

PS - I've just read your first post - 350 miles to the hives - that's one helluva'n out apiary ... !
How on earth are you going to re-set your wasp traps from such a distance ?

[CliveHive]

Thanks for the wasp tutorial - -

Yes 350 miles is a long haul.  I bought the farm ("ranch" in Texas)  when I lived 200 miles closer, in Houston.
By the time I moved to Corpus Christi, another 200 miles south, I had an emothional investment in the place
and couldn't let it go - - - too many Easter egg hunts, birthday parties and family gatherings. 

Still, it's amazing how little it changes in a month.  I button it up  - - drain pipes, etc November to mid-march - -
It never seems to change ver much during its' 'down-time'. 
Will have to open a bit earlier if I put-in some hives - - -