Wasp Blower

Vigilance and attentiveness is definitely better here; early in the year you are looking for a handful of wasps spending more time near any one part of the facade of your house than normal. Pick a warm day in mid-spring, go round the property and note where wasps are going.

You can safely use a spray to pick them off late in the evening, and if you get there early enough, depending on the species, one of those wasps could actually be the queen, because she may still be leaving the nest in order to care for her earliest brood.

If you don't get the queen, because the nest is so small, you may get enough toxin onto one of the early workers that they will bring it into contact with the queen.

You then use an insecticide foam around the entrance to any hole you see wasps going into. You can lay it on pretty thick, more than once, and they will progressively poison the nest. You can do this a few days apart in the evening.

Since the nest is still small you probably don't need to hit the nest, and you might as well leave it because then no other colony will use the space. You do need to saturate any pathway they take to it.

Directly above a bedroom window that is impossible to see from the outside but can be deduced by a process of elimination, in the roof of my 210 year old house, is a tiny gap, which attracted a nest nine years ago. I used this method and while I think I might very well have got the queen directtly, activity around the nest stopped in about 48 hours, and while every year I see wasps investigate the hole, I am guessing corpses put them off.

In the warm late spring of the pandemic I resprayed the hole, and sprayed a couple more, with what was left of the can, because I reasoned that it might be difficult to get a pest controller to deal with them; this proved to be a wise decision because nests established in several places nearby in that lovely hot summer that went untreated for far too long.

I wish I had the was blower 3 months ago. Wasps nested in the space between my laundry room and the 2nd floor. The exit was a crack between the concrete blocks outside wall and the vinyl siding. They found an entrance into the house through the overhead light socket when a fool whose name shall not be mentioned duck-taped their regular exit route. A call to the pest-control and $400.00 USD later took care of it. They bore a tiny hole next to the exit and pumped lethal gas in it. The problem with the was blower in my case it it would have to be 8 ft attached to the wall.

I tend to use a shop vacuum to get rid of undesirable wasp nests. Fill the tank with a few litres of water so the victims have something to drown in, point the tube at the nest entry or whatever entry the wasps use and switch it on for an hour or so. As soon as there is some disturbance most of the resident wasps will exit the nest to defend it so you'll get the resident population in only a few minutes. Keep the vacuum in place for a while to catch those which were out and about. Once you've got (most of) the workers the nest will die out if left alone. If you can reach it you can knock it down and drown or burn it, if it is in a wall somewhere that is not an option.

Don't forget to put water in the tank or you'll be met by a cloud of angry wasps when you open it.

Unrelated to wasp eradication, but interesting, still:

Three Valuable Peptides from Bee and Wasp Venoms for Therapeutic and Biotechnological Use: Melittin, Apamin and Mastoparan [1]

BBC: Wasp venom 'a weapon against cancer' (2015) [2]

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8000949/

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34115112

If you forget the water at first, you can always vacuum it in later