Are You Expecting Serious Wasp Problems This Week

Did you know it was wasp week? I certainly didn’t know this until a colleague came into work today and told me. Apparently this is meant to be the worst week of the year for wasp problems according to:

an insurance firm which handles 3,000 wasp and hornet claims a year. In the last week of July last year, wasp and hornet claims leapt by 98 per cent compared with the summer average. More than 200 claims were made in a single week – compared with the average of 106 for the whole summer. A similar pattern was found in 2007. Read more.

The term has been used by the Daily Mail (above) and the Daily Express so far, so I’m sure other papers will soon follow suit. Personally, I think that the fact that schools have now finished for the summer so children are at home is no coincidence. Parents are more likely to spot wasp nests (or vespiary if they are to be known by their correct name) with their youngsters playing in the garden, climbing trees, routing around in the shed to dust off bikes, balls, tennis rackets, etc.

As you all know by now, I hate wasps and so when I found the beginnings of a vespiary in our garden shed about two months ago, I got worried. It was only the size of a large egg – but I still got my husband to remove it rather than me, yeuch! The thing is, there are times when you can try to solve pest problems with DIY products, and then there are times when you really should call in the professionals.

When we lived in our previous home, a top floor maisonette, one afternoon we got a knock from our downstairs neighbours. They suggested we close our windows and either go out or stay in for the next couple of hours because a wasps nest was causing them grief and “a bloke was coming round to sort it”. This was life BR (before Rentokil) so I had no idea who “the bloke” was from (council, Rentokil or another pest control company) or what they were going to do.

About 15 minutes later we heard a serious buzzing noise and watched with fascination as some really angry wasps started hurling themselves at our now closed windows to try and remove the (I presume some kind of) nest killer powder from their bodies. We literally had to wipe all of the front windows clean after they had settled down/died. The treatment obviously did the trick – they didn’t survive nor did they ever come back!