Are you having problems with yellow jackets and other wasps around your tiny home or cabin? Learn how to control them safely in this short guide.
After we’ve spent a lot of time beautifying the outdoor spaces around our tiny home or cabin, it can be frustrating to find wasps setup camp nearby. It is one of the surefire ways to ensure that your outdoor spaces are avoided, rather than enjoyed.
My sister had this exact situation happen to her summer lake cabin – they travelled there one year, only to find European Wasps had constructed a nest under their structure. As a sad result, they stopped going there, because it was too unsafe for their children.
While European Wasps are a more dangerous problem in Australia that needs to be dealt with by a professional, in this short guide I share tips on how you can safely trap and remove other wasps, including yellow jackets.
How to Trap Yellow Jackets and Other Wasps Safely
Yellowjackets and other wasps can be a real problem, of course. They’re dangerous if you stumble upon their nests. We don’t like them scavenging around our garbage cans, either.
But wasps also chomp on all kinds of other pests. They can be a good friend to a garden. That’s why we need to find a way to reduce their ranks without wiping out the entire community.
Use a Yellow Jackets trap
You mainly use traps on yellow jackets. It’s not a good idea for other kinds of wasps. You can buy lure traps at just about any major retail store.
The idea behind these is that you’re luring in the yellow jackets that actually go out and do all of the foraging for their nests. The chemical used as a lure in these traps is usually heptyl butyrate. That’s going to catch the western yellow jackets– who are the most common kind.
You can add some raw chicken or fish (and canned tuna) to bring in some other types of yellow jackets who might be buzzing around the neighborhood. You just have to remember to change that stuff out pretty regularly. Rotting meat doesn’t really appeal to yellow jackets. You’ll need to keep emptying the lure, and probably replace the lure a few times, too.
Homemade water traps
Some people enjoy putting together homemade water traps. That’s a bucket that holds about five gallons. You fill it with soapy water and then get some ham, liver, turkey, or fish. You take that as bait and use the string to hang it about two inches over the water. Wrap some meshing around the bait so that you don’t start feeding squirrels or other animals.
Yellow jackets will fly to the meat and then go down to the water–which has the soap to help it get stuck in the water and drown. You can also add soft drinks and hummingbird nectar as a draw. These might capture too many yellow jackets in late winter. Set them in early autumn, though, and you’ll only be catching those foragers again.
What Should You Do with a Wasp Nest?
If you have found a wasp nest around your tiny home or cabin, then different action is required.
It’s not a bad idea to bring in the professionals if you have serious nest activity that needs to be dismantled. The pros aren’t going to be in a hurry to wipe out an entire community, either–especially if you explain to them that you’re gardening.
However, it’s not too bad to knock down a nest yourself when you see it just starting to form, though. All that does is send the wannabe queen off to start a new nest, or maybe go join another nest.
We don’t recommend any poison traps. The poisons that work best were taken off the market years ago. Aerosol sprays are particularly bad.
If in doubt, call a professional pest-control service to remove the nest or wasps for you. Next, discover how to deter spiders from windows and doors around your tiny home and keep spiders out of your garden boots.
