I am keen to know what issues beekeepers have had with wasps if any and specifically European Paper Wasps, we have about a dozen nests around our gardens close to palm size about 4" across.
Should be elininate them or not!
If they are anything like our yellow jacketed wasps we get rid of them when we can. They tans to be very aggressive and the stings are very painful.
To kill the nest I normally just suit up and wrap a plastic bag around it and remove it, then throw it in a fire.
In fall when they are aggressively seeking anything high in sugar we put out dishes of orange pop (has to be orange) they then take it back to their nest and it kills the next year’s queens.
I have paper wasps near my hives and they are not an issue, saying that keep an eye on them but I do not believe they are predatory on bees like the yellow jackets and prefer to feed their brood caterpillars.
Do you know why it has to be orange? We get some wasps around here and go to kill them when we can locate their nests, but it would this advise looks like a good one.
We have a healthy (imo) local honeybee (some bumbles too) year after year so hoping the orange soda won’t hurt the bees?
I have no idea why orange. And early in the year it seems to do no harm but later it does. We were selling at farmers markets and we’re have the wasps bother out customers and had wasp traps to try and reduce the problem, we were trying any sort of bait. Everything else we tried kept them alive in the traps but the orange didn’t. We’d leave the traps hidden in trees to prevent wasps for the next week and we really only saw wasps in them after the week so I think you should be good. Something in there metabolism seems to change in fall and the orange becomes poisonous.
I understand this will sound gross but here goes…if you add chopped up raw chicken liver/gizzards or cat food to the orange soda honey bees will not go near it but the yellow jackets and wasps race to the protein. It works very well especially in the fall when wasps & hornets are gathering protein for the winter.
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That is great to know.