Wasps and Walnut

[Brent Ring]

This must be my bad luck for not appropriately posting pictures of my recent black and english walnut aquisitions.

In any case I have it stickered, and stacked, drying underneath my staircase going out of the back of my house to the back patio. It seems that a nest or two of wasps out here in Utah have decided that this is a great place to make a home.

I want to get rid of the wasps and keep them from coming back. Anyone have good ideas on how to do that?

[Eric Larsen]

Well, my wood floor is done. Looks pretty good. I still have the stairs to do, but I'm not going to work on that until we're finished tiling upstairs (no use scratching the new staircase).

Problem is, when I began installation, humidity was ~20%. It's been ~2% for a month and I'm starting to get some (1/16") gaps. Even 1/8" in some places, but I've been able to knock them back to a more tolerable width.

I'm considering myself fortunate because I could have bought the house in June, installed the wood floor at 2% and then watched as everything buckled in the winter.

That leads me to my convoluted question:

Who else works in the desert (Sahara, Mojave, etc.)?

What are your go-to woods for furniture and cabinets?

Anything else you can suggest?


Thanks!

Eric

[Mark Engel]

Well, getting back to the wasps.

You don't have a lot of choices, spray 'em or dust 'em. Dust would probably be best, since it would probably be easier to get off of the wood after it has done it's thing.

My experience with wasps around here is that once you spray or dust a nest, any wasps that survive move to another area and don't come back. Just make sure to treat the nest either early in the morning or just before sundown. That way they will not be flying around as much and you will get most of them that call that nest home.

[Dan McCallum]

I've had good luck with a vacuum cleaner on wasps. It's kind of tedious, but avoids the poisons.

I use a shop vac with a 4' long rigid pipe on the end of the hose. If you can position the intake right beside the entrance to the nest, I've found a couple sessions over several days of an hour or so each will suck up anything coming in or out. If you can't lay the hose right where you want it, you'll need to hold it. It's a great job for a teenager if you have one.

Dan

PS the problem with my pile (mostly oak these days) this winter was rats. Unfortunately, they kept jamming up the vacuum cleaner!:D I had to resort to traps, but I think I got them all. Not before I got ratpee on a lot of the boards though.

[John Keeton]

Eric

I store my wood in an old tobacco barn that we have repaired and rehabbed. When we first bought this place 4 years ago, the carpenter bees were terrible. They were riddling the barn, and soon went for our back porch - the only exposed wood on our home. I had a local exterminator spray Demon in the barn, the eaves of the barn, and the underside of our elevated back porch. It lasts for 90 days and we have NO stinging critters - NONE! We have it done every year in the first of May, and it lasts through summer. I can get up in the barn loft and pick through my wood without fear of getting stung to death.

[Chris Parks]

Wasps retreat to their nests at night, or at least Australian ones do. What I do is get a long bit of timber and wrap some rag around one end, soak it in kerosene or something inflammable and light it. Now comes the fun part, using said flaming torch set fire to the nest. When they start to fly out keep the flame up there and their wings will burn off, they get fairly aggravated so this last bit is important.

[Ron Dunn]

*lol* ... Chris, the wasp nests are in a pile of walnut timber ... lighting a fire might kill the wasps, but it would be an expensive and tragic end to the timber as well!

[Chris Parks]

No, you won't have to burn it long enough for the timber to catch alight, it only takes 30 seconds or so and the nest is ash and so are the wasps. I do it on the timber eaves of our house, it hardly burns the paint.

[Matt Meiser]

I think I might got the exterminator route. :eek: :D

[John Shuk]

I'd get an air nozzle on a compressor hose and blow out between the boards one at a time. If you mess up the nest they will usually go away. If they are yellow jackets they usually aren't super aggressive but you might want to be ready to move fast.

[Matt Meiser]

I got stung several time last year when I hit a yellow jacket nest with compressed air. I was trying to blow a bunch of cobwebs out from under a little bench I built for outside my shop door and didn't see the nest. As soon as I hit it, they hit me. I have found that a mosquito fogger seems to sedate them so you can get in to spray easier. I'd hoped it would kill them, but no luck there. We get them under the benches and railings on our deck constantly. We'll probably try having some one come out this year as I was told that at least one of the major companies in our area guarantees it to last the entire season.

[J. Z. Guest]

What a fun thread! The vacuum route sounds the best so far. My shop vac has a long hose and a couple of extension pipes that would make this somewhat more safe. I'd have a garden hose in the other hand with a spray head if it were me. In case of emergency, you could spray them away from you. (just make sure you don't spray the vac, which should be several feet away)

Also, you may want to consider some a mosquito net hat. What alerts the wasps to danger is the carbon dioxide that you exhale, so they're likely to go for your face if things go awry.

[Jason King]

Depending upon how your lumber is stacked, you may just want to wait until after sundown and remove the stickers between the boards. I doubt the wasp nest can handle the weight of the boards without the stickers, thus crushing your problem. After a day or two, put the stickers back in.

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Wasps make several trips in and out of a nest each day. Place a vacuum suction hose at the nests opening.
Go away.
In a few hours you'll have 'em all.

If it's a nest you can get at you can hose it with something poisonous. concentrated Pyrithin mixed with Denatured alcohol and some mineral spirits is a fabulous knock-'em-down-and-kill-'em-dead mix. the Mineral spirits will kill plants though.
Hose the nest down at night when they are all inside.

If you are really bold throw a black trash bag over it and take it outside.

Ahhhhh
cover of darkness with a black trash bag full of angry hornets.
Suddenly the mischievous vandal inside will want out.

[Chris Padilla]

Just go to your local hardware store and pick up on of those yellow wasp/hornet/yellow jacket traps and hang it near the pile. The smelly bait inside is like filet mignon and they will high-tail it to the trap and before you know, the whole nest will be emptied or least it'll be safe to pick up a nice organic spray that will kill anything else inside the nest.

I went this route with a nest I found on one of my landscaping lights (it took two stings for me to figure out there was a nest there!).

[Craig Summers]

Instead of the Flaming australian method, you could go the CO2 route, with a CO2 Extinguisher or two.
They dont fly when its cold. And when its really really cold they die ...

I think thats how they took care of a snake in suitcase a couple months ago .. it was on the news

Although I'm not sure how close you really want to be .......

[Ken Fitzgerald]

While in the Navy at Meridian, MS I worked on GCA radar used for landing planes in bad weather or at night. The radar has to be changed when there is a change in wind direction and wasps were a major problem. This will sound crazy but works like a charm. Take a small can ...say an old empty can from a can of corn or beans....top removed.......fill it partially with gasoline or kerosene.....wait until after dark and then use a flashlight to see the nest and throw the gas or kerosene on the nest. They die from hypothermia. We used to have those rascal wasps build huge nests on the radars very quickly. We'd wait til dark and douse them. By waiting until after dark, they are back on the nest and they drop like flies....dead when they hit the ground.

[David G Baker]

Brent,
Drione is a powdered product used by pro exterminators. It is applied with a bulb duster and the product kills the stinging insects instantly. You have to get up close and personal to use the dust so if you use it be careful.
Ken's system works great as well but I use kerosene because it is less volatile.

[Dennis Hatchett]

I know it sounds unsafe and it probably is, but as long as no teenage boys read this I'll tell you what I have found to be most effective.

One or two have mentioned kerosene. My grandpa had one of those old metal garden hand pump misters that he always kept full of gasoline. I watched him kill wasps with that thing my whole life and so I just always thought that was how everyone did it.

They don't fly around and eventually die. The mist hits them and bam! They're dead. I've never used anything but gasoline and never had a problem. I would recommend using as little as possible and perhaps hosing down any structure after the deed is done. We have wasps every summer and I kill them for the whole neighborhood.

Grandpa would just walk right up to the nest without fear and spray away. I don't know if he ever got stung but he was one of those guys who wouldn't have flinched if he was.