I have a hornets' nest (could be yellow jackets) in my attic crawl space that we cannot reach. We see them entering the attic under the eaves of the house. We have been using hornet spray at the entry point, but there is still activity there. If we can plug up the entry hole, will they look for another exit through the attic since we cannot reach the nest? Do we need to hire an exterminator to crawl up there?
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Why kill them , all they they eat is bugs, are you in a bug free zone of the US? Get rid of them and get more bugs for free.
dust some sevin around the entrance hole (late at night in the dark) and the nest will be dead in a few days.
Yes, which might be into your house.
If the money is not a problem, that certainly would save wear and tear on your skin. There are some things that should be turned over to a professional.
Neat stuff! Now, to find a store that has them, near me. I invented something like this in my mind, but never did build one.
(snip sig line)
Saw a tool one day. "Why didn't I think about that?".
An ultra-light fishing reel with 4lb. test mono line. You could shoot a plastic dart/bolt across the attic and fish the line from the other side. Off target - just reel the line back and fire again.
That's what I do and it usually works fine. The bees would get it on them and carry it into the nest and the whole thing would be dead after a day or two. But the other day I happened to find a yellow jacket's nest in the ground when I was mowing and got stung twice. I've never been stung before when I happen to run over an in ground nest with my lawn tractor.
Anyway, I dropped a liberal amount of seven around and in the hole to the nest about a week ago and they are still lots of them critters coming in and out. My box of seven is a couple of years old so I might need to get another supply.
David
My brother suspended a PC cooling fan about an inch in front of the entrance hole in his eaves and turned it on. The wasps could see through the whirling blades so they flew right through it and ended up being sliced and diced. At the end of the day he had a good sized pile of wasp pieces on the ground and no live ones.
I dont think you should plug the hole because they will find another way in, possibly into your house.
Spraying pesticide seems to be problematic unless the nest isnt that far back into the eaves.
Anything you do should be done at dusk when they are all in the nest and inactive.
One interesting method that works for wasps in the ground is to put a clear glass bowl over the entrance hole. The wasps can see through the bowl and therefore dont go looking/digging for another entrance. Pretty soon they starve to death. Maybe if you used a piece of glass over the hole in your eaves the same thing would happen.
myral223_at_msn_dot snipped-for-privacy@foo.com (mlmlml) wrote in news:66588$4a9daadd$45499b77$ snipped-for-privacy@news.flashnewsgroups.com:
We used our old garage to store furniture for a year while building the new house. There were a lot of wasps in the garage. We divided a box of mothballs into 4 small plates and left then evenly spaced around the garage. The next week the wasps were still there but moving very sluggishly. We didn't plug the vents so there was a bit of air movement. After a month or two there were a lot of dead wasps all over the place but no live ones - no other pests either.
Bees once swarmed in my garage, and they could easily get in and out through the small spaces around the closed garage door. It was a large swarm, and clouds of bees flew 'round and 'round in the garage.
I took a chance to see how aggressive they were (Africanized bees weren't in our part of the country at that time.) and went into the garage, ready to dash out the house door at a moment's notice/sting. They flew around me, hummed sweet music to my ears, and ignored me entirely. I was treated to a bee concert.
Nevertheless, they were unwanted. When I found the corner where they were building the hive, I sprayed it with a household foam fire extinguisher. That did the trick. The bees that didn't die flew away immediately and I never saw them again.
The worst part was cleaning up the foam and dead bees littered all over my workbench. I was finding an occasional dead bee in nooks and crannies for over a year.
If you know where they are going in and out blow some Sevin dust up into the hole. They will take it back into the nest. It may take about a week to kill them. I used a plastic bottle like you put ketchup and mustard in. You can also get a little can at some of your garden specialty places for blowing it. Chances are the nest is right over the hole.
Jimmie
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