With summer BBQ’s in full swing and wanting to be outside in the landscape more, you might be noticing the yellow jackets as they forage for food and water.
Yellow jackets can be a real nuisance this time of year and no one wants to get stung or bitten.
Where to Place Your Trap for Best Results
- 20ft or more away from seating areas or where people are, or near a known nest.
- Hang 2-4ft above the ground.
- Hanging along the perimeter of an open area in trees or shrubs is ideal.
What To Do If You Find a Nest
If you find a nest there are a few things you can do.
Dan Scollard is a great local Corvallis, Oregon contact who can safely remove yellow jackets, wasps, or hornet nests. He sends off the wasps to collect the venom to create immunotherapy shots to help save the lives of those severely affected by their stings. Please note that Dan needs to collect nests that have not already been sprayed. Dan Scollard can be reached at 541-753-6861 or via oregonwasp@gmail.com.
If the time doesn’t allow for it or the nest needs to be treated right away, then sprays like the wasp and hornet killers work great. Applying the spray a couple of times may be necessary to make a kill. Spraying in the evening or early morning before they head out of the hive is a great time to get the biggest kill.
Another product that you can find here at Shonnard’s Nursery is the Wasp Away decoy. This is a faux nest that will deter the wasp from creating a nest in its presence. Generally a colony will not want to build a nest within 200ft of another colony. It’s important to have these out early in the season when queens are out looking for their perfect location.
The Best Time to Set Traps
All that being said, the best time to prevent yellow jackets from encroaching on your yard is in the early season of spring and late winter when the queens are headed out to make their nest for the season. The only yellowjackets that survive overwinter are queens – every one caught in February is a fertile queen, capable of establishing a nest, but all yellow jackets caught later are just foragers, not breeders.
We recommend placing traps in the first warm days of late winter, as easily as late January to early February. By catching and killing these queens you will save yourself thousands of yellow jackets in your yard. A typical peak nest in western Oregon is 4-5,000 yellow jackets. A very large colony can be almost twice that on a good year under near ideal conditions.
Between the two traps I placed this year I caught 24 plus queens. Replacing the attractant every week or so is important to draw them in and really works. I luckily haven’t had a ground nest in the last couple years with this method of early placement.
Here’s to a sting free BBQ season and enjoying our outdoor areas we have created.
~ Andrea Shonnard