Wasp Season Is In Full Swing
Late Summer is the peak of wasp season. By now, the small spring colonies have grown by enormous leaps and bounds. Mature colonies can reach populations that are above 10,000 wasps. Not all wasps are nasty, and all do a community job of some sort.
The Role That Wasps Play
Wasps are consumers, and they generally eat things that we don’t want around our homes. The vespids, the folded wing wasps, include notorious members such as Yellowjackets and Baldfaced Hornets, generally are the most aggressive pests. They are:
- In Your Face Aggressive
- Pester pets for their food
- Will swarm and sting as a group
- Defend their Nests
- Sting pets, children, adults, other animals, and everything else that makes them angry.
Even vespid wasps play a role. They eat dead things, like roadkill, dead snakes, and insects. They are, however, pests when they live near home. They are the first to eat when you put out pet food. They are the first to visit when you sit down to enjoy your outdoor living space. They help themselves to your food, join the BBQ, and will visit the pool too.
The Non-Aggressive Wasps
There is a whole other side of wasps that are not aggressive. Vespids communicate by pheromones. When one says to attack, they all attack. Solitary wasps, such as mud daubers, are not social insects like the vespids. They are solitary females, and their job is somewhat remarkable.
Mud dauber wasps are spider hunters, and a few target other types of insects, such as grasshoppers. They can be substantial, and they look amazingly dangerous. You have to go out of your way to be stung by a mud dauber wasp. Other solitary wasps are the same. They are busy hunting and trying to provision small nests where they will deposit eggs before they die. They are also remarkable hunters.
They Destroy Pests You Don’t Want Around
There is a metallic blue mud dauber that targets only black widow spiders. The Yellow and Black mud dauber wasps are generalists who target many species of spiders. The pompilid wasps are also spider hunters, and the largest will take down tarantula spiders – in their burrow.
Those tiny mud structures that mud daubers place on your house are where they stuff the spiders they hunt and where they lay an egg or two. After they lay eggs, they die. So when you remove the nests, you remove next year’s population of spider hunters.
Controlling Summer Wasps
Wasp control is a typical service call for our pest control company. We can take down ground nests, aerial nests, and nests around homes or businesses.
The best time to deal with wasps is in the spring. However, by the time we get closer to fall, the social wasps are out of control. You can put up baited traps, and they help, but they will not eliminate every wasp.
If you need a wasp nest removed, give us a call. If you need to have a wasp population reduced, we can handle that too. We provide excellent and precise pest control services throughout Bryan and College Station.
