Summer Fun – why do Wasps spoil our picnics?

Dealing with wasps, mosquitoes, and other insects

Mosquitoes and flies seek outstanding water to breed and can lay 100 to 200 eggs in one clutch. To prevent a rapid increase in mosquitoes in your yard, it’s best to get rid of any sources of stagnant water, which can be hiding in watering cans, pots or gutters that are clogged.

If you are interested in why Wasps do what they do please read on but if you just want them to go away – jump to the bottom of this section where we talk about wasp murder!

Late summer is when wasps become more aggressive, to understand why these wasps become really annoying at this time of the year, you need to understand their life cycle.

Interesting fact – did you know that there are approx 9,000 species of wasps?  You may find that surprising? When we are talking about wasps, we’re nearly always speaking about the Common wasp (Vespula Vulgaris).  click if you would like to identify the insect in your yard!

Common wasps live socially like bees, but unlike bees, they haven’t evolved a way of storing food to allow the colony to survive the winter.  In fact, the only survivors are the young, fertilized queens who hibernate over the winter, they emerge in the spring to build little walnut-sized nests where they lay around 20 eggs.

The queen feeds the resulting larvae until around May when they mature and become workers.  Then she focuses on more egg-laying and the workers get on with feeding them, enlarging the nest as they go along.  By this time of year, the nest has grown to around 40 cm in diameter, often larger, and that nest can contain up to 10,000 wasps!

Then in late August and September, a dramatic change takes place, the queen quits her egg-laying (save a few that will go on to be future queens and males to fertilize them) and she no longer releases the pheromone that causes the workers to work.

Basically, these workers are laid off the job and become disorientated and the problem for us is that although adult wasps are insect predators, the meat is to feed the larvae, not themselves.  In their adult state wasps are not able to digest solid food and need a sugary liquid to survive – the larvae provide this sugary liquid to the worker bees.  Now with no larvae and therefore no food, they come uncontrollably and insatiably hungry.

Wasps love easy food such as overripe fruit and your fizzy drinks, wasps favorite food towards the end of their brief lives, their hunger drives them to search for easy sugar at exactly the time when we are more likely to be using our gardens and outdoor spaces for eating sweet things.  The timing could be better for them or worse for us. Be mindful to put your drinks in a glass rather than drinking directly out of the can otherwise your beverage might pack a bit more of a punch than you intended!

So why are those who panic and try to swat them away more likely to be stung than those who remain calm?  Well, the problem is that these redundant workers have their own pheromone, which helps protect the nest from attack earlier in the year, and that’s essentially a chemical rallying cry, when you swat that annoying wasp and it feels under attack, that rallying cry will go out.  Suddenly it all kicks off, and loads more wasps will start arriving in aggressive ‘red-mist’ mode, fired up and ready to defend their nest.  That’s why the best advice is to stay calm.

Think of it this way from May that wasp has been working its socks off helping to keep things nice on planet earth.  Now it’s going to die.  So why not give it a break, save your swats, put a bowl of sugary drink somewhere out of your way, and let it go out on a nice sugar rush at the very least don’t kill it.

What’s the point of wasps?  Without them it’s likely that human life would not survive because, in the absence of their role as predators, our planet would be overrun by even more damaging insects such as aphids, ants, and caterpillars,

For those of you who are just interested in getting rid of your problems please read on.. if you still need to control them purchase a pest control product and follow the instructions on the packet.  If in doubt call in an expert.

All the rest of those pesky pests

Check your home for signs of pests. It’s not a pleasant subject, but being proactive when it comes to pests in and around your home is much better than trying to solve a pest problem that has gotten out of hand. For more advice on this problem here is link to Pest control tips – Canada.ca , taking preventive measures such as removing sources of food, water, and shelter, and closing off places where pests can enter and hide. If you do need to use pesticides, choose the lowest-risk product first, and use it according to the directions. If you hire a pest control pro, ask him or her to use bait, and crack and crevice control when possible; fogging should be a last resort.

Citronella candles and diffusers can be effective insect repellents in outdoor spaces, but they need to be used properly for any positive bug-reducing effect.  If they haven’t worked for you in the past, chances are you haven’t had enough of them to properly cover a seating area with the protective scent. A quick test: If you can’t strongly smell the citronella when you’re seated, chances are that the smell will not be strong enough to repel insects.

Citronella is best used in combination with other control measures, such as topical insect repellent.

Bring your cushions inside when you’re not using them, because mosquitoes aren’t likely to hang out on cushions, but other creepy crawling things might. To avoid needing to brush off spiders, ants before you can kick back and relax on an outdoor sofa.

Categorised in: Home Maintenance

This post was written by Team CORE