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Post by featherduster on Jun 12, 2018 17:46:05 GMT -5
OK: How many a day do you find in your home or attached garage everyday?
I live in a woods surrounded by agricultural fields and marshes so I have averaging about 2-3 a day in the house and about 6-8 in my garage.
I read an extensive article regarding these nasty bugs and the worst is yet to come. I am doing a complete makeover on the exterior of my home this summer and as I go along I am looking for every possible entryway that I can close off as I go along.
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Post by deadeer on Jun 12, 2018 17:58:43 GMT -5
Surrounded by woods on 3 sides, ag on one side, NE LaPorte county. Probably averaging 10 everyday, have had influxes of 25+ on more than one occasion. Old farm house, not tight. Have tried, but removing siding always turns into huge ordeal. I cleaned out one window ac, bet there was a hundred. Good thing they arent ants or wasps. We would be in trouble. Lol
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Post by scrub-buster on Jun 13, 2018 6:45:45 GMT -5
Whenever I move something in the garage I find a pile of them that tried hibernating there. They don't get in the house very often.
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Post by dbd870 on Jun 13, 2018 8:08:35 GMT -5
Once in a while; not very often. I'm really surprised we don't get more than we do
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Post by Deleted on Jun 13, 2018 8:43:51 GMT -5
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Post by Russ Koon on Jun 13, 2018 9:59:20 GMT -5
Waynes, I saw that advice a couple years ago on the 'net. I try to be eco-conscious and responsible whenever I can, within reason, so I decided I would give it a try. I had also sprayed a nest of german yellowjackets that was under my deck in a railroad tie left over from an earlier landscaping project, with no apparent effect, using a couple cans of commercial hornet and wasp killer which had worked as advertised on previous battles with wasps and our old regular yellowjackets over the years
Mixed up a gallon of the mixture per the instructions on the net and repeatedly attacked the tie as often as I could get back within range of the squirter without getting stung, until the entire bottle had been used, and a few of those little monsters had nailed me. Each attack put down a few of them, but not many, and I saw some of the ones I had thought down for the count getting airborn again after briefly drying out.
IMO, the method may work great on all other species, but failed completely on the german yellowjackets. I ended up with some very clean but very angry little bugs.
The tie that they were living in had been hollowed out, whether by the germans or the carpenter ants that destroyed most of the rest of my landscaping ties. It wasn't going to be useful for anything again, so my next step was to go for the nuclear option. A brother-in-law dropped by to help me in case of an uncontrolled fire, and I poured as much as I could get into the crack in the tie in several forays with a two-liter plastic botle full of a gas/kerosene mix. Then we stood well back and prepared to make a rapid escape, and lit the end of the tie with a rigged "long match" (a rolled paper towel, kerosene-soaked and sticking out of six-foot long piece of pipe).
That mission was successful, and less dramatic than we had thought it could be, with the fire just burning pretty rapidly and not exploding, and not burning too high or needing any control with the water hose we had at hand. We did have to retreat a little ways to avoid more than the few stings we received in the process, but only a few more steps.
I also repeated the experiment twice more with another nest I found in another landscaping tie that was about fifty feet from the one we burned out, and one in the ground in the front yard the following year. In both cases, the commercial wasp and hornet spray was tried first, and was ineffective, then the Dawn and water mixture, with the same result. And again followed a few days later by either another kerosene/gas mix, or on the lawn, a pure gas liter or so deposited directly into the hole well after dark, followed quickly by a lighted kitchen match and a concrete block popped over the hole to prevent escape. Had to do both those other procedures twice, as te first time in each location apparently missed a few that were supposed to return to the nest every night but didn't (maybe some teen-age yellowjackets?).
Anyway, those were my only experiences with the german yellowjackets, and also with the Dawn/water mix, so the above was the only conclusion I could draw.
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Post by steiny on Jun 13, 2018 11:07:47 GMT -5
Those things are a pain and they just showed up in the last decade or so. Don't ever remember them being problematic ten years ago.
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Post by lawrencecountyhunter on Jun 13, 2018 11:28:08 GMT -5
Every once in a while they get in the house, usually upstairs. We don't have too bad of a problem though.
If Wyoming didn't have them before, I introduced a new population of probably 40-50 last year into the Snowy Range. I had left my tent and other equipment on the porch for a few days prior to the trip, then loaded it all up and drove out there. There were a ton that had crawled inside my tent bag, and even inside the tent itself while it was all rolled up in there. As I erected the tent, I kept grabbing stinkbugs and tossing them out the tent door. It did snow about 8" about a day after that, so I don't know if any survived the storm.
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