Wasp nest

[Steve Walker]

Any of the colonial hymenoptera will have a go at you if you threaten their nest.

[Sportsman]

Many of the local peasant farmers (I am not being insulting, they are very proud of being peasants) believe that hornets are very dangerous.

2 bites enough to kill a man and 3 bites for an ass. The moral seems to be "don't get bitten on the ass"

[Ken L]

brother had a nasty hornet encounter last week! shovelling straw for the pheasant pens and the buggers had nested in between the bails.... he was stung 10 times across his body and once on the tongue when one landed on his face and bit his lip... face blew up like a balloon and we very nearly had an emergency hospital run on our hands! facial swelling went down really quickly luckily...but it was a close call!

 

I think we can safely put that in the category of seriously annoying them.

 

Just a quick thought about poisons if you are going to bait the nest is that ant killer or borax mixed with jam should work just fine if you have them laying about.

[kirisute]

Dad mixed up some washing up liquid and ant powder in a big backpack sprayer! Utterly deadly!

They went back next day and "nuked the site from orbit," lol

[Vagabond]

When I was a kid, I watched (from a prudent distance) on several occasions my uncle put his "smoke and choke" wasp-grub collection system into operation.

 

Used 12-bore cartridges stuffed with a mixture of flowers-of-sulphur and fine crystals of saltpetre were ignited and thrust into the nest. After a while the wasps were adjudged stupefied and the nest was pulled (or in many cases, dug) out and split open. Seemed a bit "hit or miss" to me, as from memory he averaged a couple of stings per nest.

 

Anyway, it taught me the value of wasp grubs as bait. In later years I found motor-cycle leathers, gloves, goggles etc, coupled with a thick "balaclava" and facemask quite adequate for removing wasps' nests and collecting grubs, without the aid of sulphur or anything else. In general most of the wasps buzz around a bit, but don't persist with an attack if they can't find something to sting.

 

Poisoning nests in my younger days was done with cyanide, so rendering the grubs unusable as bait. Dunno precisely what is in modern wasp poisons, so would not use them. Manufacturers hide behind meaningless numbers (PSW 19) or a trade name (Bendiocarb) which is presumably some sort of carbamate. Whatever, I would not use the grubs obtained from nests poisoned with commercial poisons as bait.

 

However, nests poisoned with borax might be safe enough to use the grubs as bait.

Edited August 17, 2015 by Vagabond

[Steve Walker]

There were concerns about the risk to fish of nests poisoned with cyanide. I think if done correctly it probably wasn't a problem - cymag evolves hydrogen cyanide in the presence of moisture, so it was possible to gas the nest without contaminating it with the powder. Whether that's what happened in practice is another question, and would worry me.

 

The advice on poisoning nests for bait with contact insecticides used to be to sneak up after sunset when the wasps are at home and put the powder where they would contaminate themselves on the way out of the nest the next day, hopefully preventing them from walking it back in. Hard luck for any birds in the vicinity, I should think.

 

Wonder how effective a CO2 fire extinguisher would be?

[Vagabond]

There were concerns about the risk to fish of nests poisoned with cyanide. I think if done correctly it probably wasn't a problem - cymag evolves hydrogen cyanide in the presence of moisture, so it was possible to gas the nest without contaminating it with the powder. Whether that's what happened in practice is another question, and would worry me.

..and rightly so. When I was a pharmacist's apprentice, nothing as fancy as Cymag was used - just a lump of sodium cyanide in a glass ointment jar, and any old passing layabout could buy it provided he was literate enough to sign the poisons register (and by inference, streetwise enough not to put his real name and address) Buyers of poisons were supposed to be "known" to the pharmacist - honoured more in the breach...... "Hello, I'm Dan Smith from Spratt's Bottom - so now you know me"

[Steve Walker]

I think that's probably pretty much all Cymag was! Salt of a weak acid, reversibly dissociated.