Wasps are most active during the summer months and can cause a nuisance as well as painful stings. Wasps will sting en masse and should only be dealt with by professional wasp removal services.
Wasp removal services
Wasp nests can be dangerous to handle and should only be dealt with by a professional pest controller with the correct personal protective clothing and appropriate equipment.
If the first treatment from myself is unsuccessful, I will retreat free of charge. Wasps do not swarm or relocate during their life cycle.
Learn more about wasps
If you are interested in learning more about wasps, hopefully you will find this information useful.
These have very little impact on human life styles.
Social Wasps are the type that most people are more familiar with spoiling quiet family barbecues, pub garden drinks, feeding in litter bins etc.
There are about 7 species of Social Wasps in Britain. The queen emerges from her hibernation point as the weather warms up in spring. She will feed herself up on insects and insect larvae and she will in turn come in to egg laying condition. She would have mated the previous autumn with drones (males) from several nests before hibernating for the winter. As she comes into egg laying condition she will pick a suitable site to build a nest, maybe in your shed, air bricks, compost area, under roof tiles, boxes storied in garages, sheds, or underground in a decaying tree root or old mouse nest – the locations are many.
The nest is made of chewed wood fibres mixed with her saliva. The nest is usually about 15-20mm in diameter, shaped like an inverted umbrella, where there will be 15-20 egg cells built vertically with eggs suspended inside them. The queen will feed the emerging larvae with insect larvae or insect bodies caught by her on the wing or off of plants. The insects/larvae and wood fibres are cut by its very strong mandibles.
Once these wasp larvae have been fed, pupated and then emerged from the pupation case they will be infertile females whose sole purpose is to feed larvae within its own nest and defend it with their sting! Which is where the contact with humans comes in!
The queen’s duties will eventually turn to egg laying within the nest. With the workers building the nest, protecting it from predatory insects, especially hornets, birds, cleaning it and feeding the wasps larvae with insect bodies. The wasps larvae in turn excrete a sugary solution which the wasps feed on and which forms a social bond within the next.
As late summer approaches the queen is unable to continue her egg laying capacity, but produces fertile male and female eggs which will be the next year’s queens and males to mate with. After hatching the newly emerged queens and drones mate, the drones (males) die and the queens will hibernate after feeding themselves up on insects. This year’s egg laying queen will then die in the autumn. The wasps that are around the nest will defend it with more resistance as their social structure within the nest breaks down. These too will die off as the cold weather approaches.
A nest may be as large as a football or bigger potentially holding up to 5,000 wasps in the late summer.