Author: Kurt Treftz, Cascade Pest Control
Professional Pest Control for Wasps & Yellow Jackets
The yellow jacket is the most troublesome wasp variety in the Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, and Bellingham areas. Yellow jackets are nasty in two ways:
- How they aggressively defend their nests, often causing many stings and injuries to anyone that stumbles upon them.
- How they aggress themselves onto our food, especially during barbeques or picnics.
All wasp stings are painful, and they can be debilitating if one is stung many times or is allergic. Bees have barbs on their stingers only allowing them to sting once, but wasps—including yellow jackets—can sting multiple times and continue living.
There are two major types of yellow jackets, and they each make two different kinds of nests:
- Those that nest in the ground and other earthly cavities. These nests can usually found within an abandoned rodent hole, in a hollow stump, post or log, or within a wall or other void of a home. Sometimes they even find a small cavity in a rockery or beneath a sidewalk and excavate it further so their colony can fit.
- Those that make hanging nests within bushes, from tree limbs, or under porch or roof eaves of a home or business. In this case, they easily rearrange the layers of paper they make to expand the nest. They can get quite large.
Ground nests are often painfully discovered by walking over the nest, which poses a particular threat to pets and children. Homeowners or workers are often shocked to find yellow jacket ground nests when mowing grass or when clearing brush and debris. This video shows how hidden and camouflaged these nests can be, therein increasing their hazardousness in residential areas.
When yellow jackets nest in the wall void of a home, or in the attic just above the ceiling, they pose an even more unique threat—they are only ½” from entering your home in large numbers. Yellow jackets excavate these areas of insulation and so forth as their colony expands in size, and they are known to scratch on the interior of the Sheetrock until they punch through. Occasionally, yellow jacket colonies become exposed to the living space of home and families have to flee.
Yellow Jacket workers die each fall and the nest is abandoned. Before this, the colony has sent out dozens of fertilized females to become future queens the next spring. These new queens will then start new colonies and nests in different places than before, therein highlighting the importance of continued, ongoing maintenance and surveillance by professionals.
Other types of wasps are mud daubers and ‘polestes.’ Mud daubers aren’t social wasps and make small nests out of mud that amount to elongated mud tubes in which their larvae hatch and grow. Polestes are a social wasp that nest in small numbers on a small umbrella-shaped paper nest of cells. Both pack a ferocious sting, however, they are far less aggressive than yellow jackets.
Cascade Pest Control for Yellow Jackets and Other Wasps
Cascade wasp control services—usually bi-monthly—sweep under any accessible eaves or other spots on your home that would be easy targets for yellow jackets and other wasps to make hanging nests. Our trained technicians are experienced and provide comprehensive care, including proactively scanning and analyzing where your home might be vulnerable to invasion. We are particularly active in the spring, summer, and early fall for wasp control, as these are times when the nests might be moving and re-forming. We are dedicated to preventative, on-going care that includes removal and abatement of any active yellow jacket nests which is included at no extra cost.
Cascade Pest Control provides yellow jacket and other wasp control services in Tacoma, Seattle / Puget Sound, Redmond, Bellevue and the Eastside, Everett, Skagit & Island counties, and Bellingham.
Call us: 888-989-8979 or Request a Quote online
