Yellow Jacket Extermination Remedies

Life Cycle

• Yellow jackets have a vivid color scheme of black with jagged yellow abdomen bands. Their life cycle starts when a queen comes out of her winter hibernation to start a new nest in a protected cavity or other sheltered space. From spring to midsummer, yellow jackets seek protein to feed their hungry worker and queen larvae. A mature yellow jacket nest can contain dozens, hundreds or thousands of wasps. By late summer, colonies seek sweets to fatten up the queens for their winter hibernation, which begins in fall before the first hard freeze. The winter cold kills the workers. The queens emerge again next spring to each start a new colony.

Stay Away

• Yellow jacket stingers don't barbs, so each one can sting repeatedly. This ability coupled with their tendency to swarm in defense of their nest can make them a problem when they nest in near people. If you see lots of them going in and out of a single location, it’s probably a nest. The simplest way to deal with yellow jackets is simply to avoid their nests. Keep scavenging yellow jackets away by taking food and beverages inside and keeping garbage cans tightly covered.

Preventive Controls

• You can reduce yellow jacket populations in your yard with commercial or home made traps. Put out traps from early spring to midsummer when they can catch queens before they start a new nest. Commercial traps have replaceable bait that attracts the insects into the trap. Once in, they can’t get out. Change the bait and empty the trap monthly. Some traps use poisoned bait that foraging wasps bring back to share with nest mates. Make a trap out of a 5-gallon bucket filled with three-fourths of an inch of soapy water. Cover the bucket with a wide mesh screen such as hardware cloth. Suspend a piece of fresh meat an inch above the water. Yellow jackets fly in to collect protein for their nest. The wasps will drop from the meat to gain speed for flight but instead land in the water and drown. Change the meat every other day.

Bug Sprays

• If the nest is small, you can knock it down or attack it with a spray insecticide for wasps and hornets. Wear protective clothing and attack at night when yellow jackets are likely to be sleeping. Underground nests can be quite distant from the entrance and the spray might not get all the wasps. Wait at least a day for the remaining wasps to settle down before attacking a nest again. If faced with a large yellow jacket nest that presents problems, you should call in an exterminator.