The View from Mudsock Heights: It's Time Once Again to Do Something About the Wasp Nests

By Dennis E. Powell | Jun 10, 2009 at 17:58:54

It looks to me as if this is going to be a banner year for wasps. I’m no expert, but the population of paper wasps seemed higher the first few warm days than it was any time last year. And this year they seem kind of berserk.

True, a bunch of paper wasp nests isn’t the problem that a hornet’s nest or a bunch of yellow jackets is, but I’ve had it with paper wasps. Just had it with them.

My understanding of the natural history of the paper wasp is that queens emerge from someplace when the weather gets warm, and get to work making their nests of chewed wood pulp. Then they lay eggs which, one might think, go through larva and pupa to full stinging adult in about 15 minutes.

If this is true — well, all but the 15-minute part — then there’s an abundance of queens this year.

May had not arrived and already I’d begun subconsciously listening for the slight sound made when a wasp that has gotten inside bumps into the ceiling as it flies around. There was a time when I was younger and, yes, even stupider, and having a wasp or two flying around the house didn’t much bother me. No more.

The transition was not gradual. It began the summer my dad and I re-roofed our house in Missouri. Working along the eaves in one section, my father made the quickest trip down a ladder I’ve ever seen. There had been a paper-wasp nest up there someplace, and the miserable insects decided to say hello. He was stung more than a dozen times and really messed up his shoulder when he made his semi-controlled landing.

We had never done much about wasps until then; the occasional sting was to be expected (and was no worse than the “treatment,” which was to bathe the stung area in ammonia; best I can tell it never made any difference one way or the other except to make the victim stink of ammonia). But now war had been declared.

My father knew something that I didn’t: the time to get rid of a wasp nest is at night. The wasps are all at home and all can be killed. I figured that if you knocked the nest down, that would be that. I knew where a big nest was, so I got a piece of bamboo that had been at the center of a roll of carpet and knocked the nest down. Bad idea. Very bad idea.

The ranks of homeless wasps surrounded our house for what seems like most of the rest of the summer. I got stung. My sisters got stung. So did my parents and grandparents. My ammonia-scented family eyed me as angrily indoors as the wasps did outdoors.
Since then, paper wasps and I have not been friends.

It is said, properly, that wasps are on the whole beneficial, but when it comes to paper wasps, I do not see much that is gained by their presence. Wasps and their kin kill about 100 people in this country each year, chiefly through allergic reaction.

Sadly, nowhere near enough is known about allergies. Some allergens, in some people, over time produce a resistance. But some allergens, in some people, result in greater sensitivity. If the speculative literature I’ve read on the subject — written by learned people, so “speculative” means merely that they’re giving their best estimate — is accurate, paper wasps are chiefly among the latter. For some people, having been stung before increases the likelihood that the next sting will threaten his or her life.

Compare this to, say, rattlesnakes. They don’t kill 100 people here in a typical year. They are certainly beneficial, helping to keep the rodent population down. And their bite offers a lot more time to seek treatment than a wasp sting with allergic reaction does. Yet if people stepping outside in the summer had to dodge hordes of rattlesnakes, there would be considerable complaint about it, don’t you think?

I’ve experimented with commercial wasp traps, and the results have not been promising. These things lure wasps through a funnel-shaped opening with the promise of something that smells good to them. But then the wasps fall into a liquid and drown. Traps may be very effective for some kinds of wasps, particularly yellow jackets, but in my experience they are of little interest to paper wasps.

So for the rest of the summer, come evening I’ll be outside with a can of stuff poisonous only to wasps — it apparently dissolves their waxy coating and they dehydrate — looking for their nests, then soaking them. A wonderful gadget I got right after I moved here, an electric bug zapper shaped like a tennis racquet, is too weak for them, alas.

And as I go about my wasp extermination duties, I’ll hope for an evolutionary leap. Maybe paper wasps can be taught to eat Asian ladybugs. Or maybe Asian ladybugs can be taught to eat paper wasps.

Either would be fine.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.