Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Killing yellow jackets

Very useful trick if you have a nest or multiple nests of yellow jackets nearby. Skip the traps, they only catch a few. This kills them all, every time. It will kill the entire nest, wherever they are, as far as they fly in from.

Fry some hamburger just enough to break it up like taco meat, leave it as raw as possible. Add powdered insect killer. Put it in a shallow pan outside somewhere the dogs and cats can't get at it.

If you have aggressive bees, they'll be on it very quickly. They'll carry off the individual chunks of meat to the nest and kill everybody.

One year I had an infestation of tens of thousands of yellow jackets. Bastids were hovering all over the ground, constant swarms from before daybreak to after dark. Guess they were feeding on an insect of some kind maybe aphids, ants, ?? Don't know. Point is, they were so thick you couldn't run to the car w/o getting chased.

I killed them all. I didn't see one or two yellow jackets a year for several years until this year, when I just had to kill a new batch. This works very well and targets the meat eating bees. Don't put up with them one more day!

Sounds effective, but not nearly as much fun as standing by the nest entrance and shooting them with a BB gun.

Fireball2,

There is another excellent way if you can get to the entrance to the nest.

Get a plastic squeeze bottle and cut the spout back a little where you can get a good puff of powder through it and load it up with Sevin dust. A plastic ketchup bottle should do, (I used an empty 90wt gear lube bottle.)

Wait until dark when the bees are inactive for the night, and squirt a generous dose of Sevin into the opening. Guaranteed there will be no bees alive in less than 24 hours.

Just make sure to shake the powder down to the spout end of the bottle before you 'squirt'.

Myron

Sounds interesting. I use 7 dust too.

I went on the warpath when I got stung while weeding. I take that very personally. The nice thing about the poisoned meat is that you don't have to know where they are or how many nests there are. The bees do all the work.

Gas in the hole with a Mandela necklace at the exit.

It's the most rewarding anyway. ...

Bucket of water and some detergent. wait until dark and pour down the hole. The detergent lets the water go through the exoskeleton and they drown. I love to listen to them screaming and crying for help.

We had the kind that build a 'paper football' in our crawl space many years ago, and the entrance was close to the entrance to the house.
I did the Sevin dust 'whoosh' trick on that one and they were gone right now !
The 'paper football' is probably still there, as I have never gone in there to get it out.

Myron

Scott,

I had a ground nest of some kind of varmint (don't think they were yellow jackets, but some kind of ground hornet.)
Waited until dark and dumped some gasoline in it.

When I opened it up the next day, there were 3 or 4 layers on top of each other in that nest.

Myron

I had a big nest about 2 years ago. Armadillos took care of it for me.

I hate armadillos.

For a nest in the ground. Wait until dark, take an old glass pop bottle fill it with gas. Pour the gas in while leaving the bottle shoved in the hole. Next morning all those pest are gone. No need for a match. The fumes get them.
Works every time.

Steve

I haven't tried this personally but I have read that some people have success using a shop vac near the entrance. Apparently the yellow jackets attack the noisy hose and get sucked inside to their deaths.

Personally, I used Sevin or Malathion for my last ground nest. Just mix 2 gallons in a 5 gallon bucket and pour it over the nest area at night.

You guys are talking about hornets. Yellow jackets build nests under the eaves of houses and such. They are pretty aggressive if you poke around on the nest, that's for sure.

We always got them all stirred up then fought them with badminton rackets.

I don't do that anymore.

You can shoot them over bait too. It doesn't take long to kill off a nest that way. I shot them over melon rinds several years ago and haven't had any since.

Nuke 'em from space. Its the only way.

No, they are discussing yellow jackets - ground nesting (mostly) very aggressive predatory wasps, primarily Vespula squamosa, Vespula maculifrons, Vespula pensylvanica, and Vespula atropilosa, though (depending upon who is doing the classification) there may be up to 17 different species very similar in behavior and appearance.

http://ento.psu.edu/extension/factsheets/eastern-yellowjacket

These bastards:

Hornets are big and live in a paper nest that looks kinda like a football, but bigger in most cases. Yellow jackets live in the ground but there is a yellow wasp that looks like them that live in paper nests under the eaves of houses and such like red wasps. Back in 2001 we ran into yellow jackets near Monticello, Arkansas that would leave their stinger in you just like a bee, and hurt like the devil. They are the bane of Surveyors and have numerous and huge colonies from the end of August and into September on into frost. The colonies keep getting bigger and are at the biggest right before being killed for the winter. Not sure how they come back in the spring but they are not much trouble then. miles

I underwent a very intensive courtship process that included ensuring my wife was not allergic or afraid of these things.

Being successful in that effort, I let my wife take care of the things, leaving me time for more time worthy endeavors...

Do any of y'all go so far as to do a control program so that you can mow, etc without running into nests?

No doubt about that.

I had to unass a setup once, and after about 300 U.S. Survey feet, still had them humping my carharts trying to sting me.

They are evil.