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How To Locate And Eradicate A Yellow Jacket Nest In The Exterior Walls Of Your House In Early Spring

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Yellow jacket wasps will soon be emerging from their winter slumber in the Northeast, and the young queen wasps will be looking for places to start a new nest. Among their favorite places to build a nest is in the exterior cracks and crevices of a home. This may not be a problem at first, but as the nest grows, the yellow jackets can enter your home. Yellow jackets are fierce defenders of their nests and if you, one of your family members, or one of your pets gets too close to the nest, they could be attacked by hundreds of yellow jacket wasps while inside the home. This is the time of year to start watching for new nests getting built inside the exterior walls of your house so you easily eliminate the nest before it gets too big. Here is how to spot a new nest and how you should eliminate it.

Finding a Nest

The problem with trying to spot yellow jacket nests early in the spring is that the size of the population in the nest is very small. Late in the summer, you will typically see a line of yellow jackets flying to and from the nest throughout the day, but that is because there is usually thousands of yellow jacket living in the nest by that point in time during the summer. In the spring, there may be less than 100 yellow jackets in the nest, and as the temperatures warm up, there will only be a few adult yellow jackets flying in and out of the crevice in the house. You have to be very careful when inspecting the exterior of the house for yellow jacket activity.

Yellow jackets leave the nest en masse early in the morning to forage for food, and they return en masse in the evening to bed down for the night. During the day, the yellow jackets will fly back and forth to the nest in low enough numbers that they can be hard to detect. So, you want to inspect the exterior of the house at dawn and at dusk to increase your chances of seeing yellow jackets in the beginning life cycle of the nest. When you find a multitude of yellow jackets flying in and out of a crevice, you can be sure you have located a nest.

Eliminating the Nest

The best time to spray the nest is right after nightfall. All the yellow jackets should have returned at that point and they are entering an inactive state for the night. Buy a can or two of yellow jacket pesticide spray. Make sure the spray comes with a straw you can use to stick into the crevice to make sure the pesticide saturates the nest. Spray the entire can into the crevice.

You should watch the nest for a few more days to see if there is any additional yellow jacket activity after you have sprayed the nest. If you see yellow jackets after a couple of days, spray the other can of pesticide into the nest. This should eradicate the nest and make it inhospitable for any other yellow jackets who might want to make the crevice their home.

If you feel you cannot do this alone, or if you continue to have problems, it may be best to call in a professional pest control company, such as Kettle Moraine Pest Control.


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