aemeijers wrote:

On 9/29/2011 3:49 PM, notbob wrote:
On 2011-09-29, wrote:

tonight. The best time to hit them is at night when everyone's home.

Good point. I've never gone this route, so figured they'd be more
susceptible when awake and I had no idea there were so many in that
shed. No doubt this whole scenario will be repeated next season, but
for now I figure I jes eliminated a sh*tload of them sonsabitches.


nb didn't say if these were ground nesting, or the paper mache things in
an interior corner of shed. For ground-nesting nasties, best cure I have
found is put a window screen over the hole about an hour after dark,
pour about 2 glugs of simple green on the screen, and flood the sucker
with the hose. Finally tried that after wasting 20-30 bucks on spray
cans, pink powder, etc. Dumb things- a quarter mile in any direction are
dozens of acres where they can live in peace, but they have to build in
my yard? Nothing like a sudden 'bee fountain' while you are mowing in
shorts and a tee shirt, to make your day suck.

You should find out what sort of wasps you have. This year I got a
whole lot of big ones digging holes in the lawn and seemingly living
alone underground. They come out from time to time and buzz you but
otherwise didn't seem to be in the same order of nastiness as the ones
that hang in a nest under the eaves and similar places. Still wasps
are wasps so not knowing much about them I did some research on line
and also asked at a couple of nurseries. Surprisingly of the "live"
sources the HD guy was the most helpful but all of them were well
behind the on line sources. It seems that what I had was an
infestation of Cicada-killing wasps. They kill cicadas (duh!), by
mildly stinging them, drag their dying corpses underground and lay
their eggs IN the still-barely-alive bodies. Next year the young eat
their way through the cicada and leave the nest. There's no swarming
and they live solitary lives and, most importantly, they don't
generally sting us. The female has a mild (to us) sting and the male
has no stinger at all.

Because of the nesting habits once you've got them you'll have them
every year unless you take drastic measures like pouring kerosene down
the holes and igniting it (one website's answer). And there's a reason
why they choose your yard instead of the "dozens of acres" nearby:
they need easy access to their tunnels which is best achieved by
nesting where humans have cut the grass close to the ground, not in
open fields. Like the cockroach they seem to have developed a
symbiotic relationship with man and are supposedly proliferating. No
real reason to kill them.