On Monday I was called out to this house. Yellow Jackets were entering the master bath. You tell me where.

So I banged on the "entry" and got a grand total of three yellow jackets to exit and they weren't aggressive at all. Try as I might I could not get a reaction so I put up the ladder and gave it a look, no carton at all. So I dug a little deeper and made the determination that there was not a yellow jacket nest anywhere in this house.

But....



I'll continue in a moment. Discuss among yourselves.

There was a hole in the plastic tubing and they were living in a yellow jacket condo in the attic or between floors, or something?

Paul the "entry" was the right exhaust vent in that pair of vents just above square window over the garden tub.


Since I have seen this presentation before I did a little stroll through this cookie cutter subdivision.


Nope not the house next door. BTW these are all west facing walls.


BINGO, this one is it.

Note the similarities in the first two photos in this thread, those are two different houses with a house in between.


Guess which one of these two exhaust vents, which are to the left of the square window over the garden tub, is the real entry.

Back in a little......

Rick, you took the post right out of my mouth. We have people for that. But that cookie cutter thing is really interesting. If it ever comes up, I will again mystify my technicians with my brilliance. Thanks David.

Rick, you got it but then again I did call your missus to have her give your guys a heads up on this scenario.

The yaller jackets coming in at ridge top level look down and go to the best match they have imprinted on their memory.

In beekeeping we call this drifting. Usually in the beeyard where you have a nice neat row of all the same white painted boxes of all the same height. But honeybees have much finer imprinting skills as I have never observed this type of mix up, ie missing their house by two or more, in honeybees. A few boxes in a bee yard, yes, but not from house to house. The closest thing to it was once where a lady had bees entering her home but upon inspection no colony was found. I happened to observe the flight path of some honeybees passing by the home. Beelining that path found a honeybee colony in a shed on the neighbor's property. A quick check of the weather for the day prior revealed that the wind direction and speed was just enough to blow the bees off the path and into the client's home.

The first time I encountered this behavior in yaller jackets was in a condiminium complex. We got a call for yaller jackets entering a unit but try as I could I couldn't find the source of the problem. It was six calls later that I and a tech were pulling our hair out that I backed off and gave the entire building a once over. Actually I was standing a good ways up wind trying to pull something out of my butt to save this client when it dawned on me that each unit was identical. The problem area was a sunroom bump out on the third floor and every unit had a sun room, all four levels. So I started searching each sunroom bump out and low and behold four units down I found the nest, and you guessed it on the on the third level. Like any good NWCO I filed it away in my own memory banks and have since seen it several times over. So I thought I'd share a pictorial tonight to demonstrate.

Well, I'm in to my third drambuie of the night and playing hob typing so I'll call it a night and finish up on the morrow.

BTW, it was the right exhaust vent.

And now for the rest of the story.



By now most of you are aware that I use a vaccum system of my own design. Dubbed the Wasp Warrior by some.


A wooden "kill chamber" of my own design powered by a shop vac/blower motor.


This is the interior with a shredder plate.


A removable double screen to keep debris out of the motor.


And here it is ready to go into action. That's a shop vac hose and a ten foot stick of PVC and an assortment of plumbing fittings.


In this case I used a 4"x6" rubber reducer to make a hood that I will slap over the exhaust vent.
Slapping the hood over the vent got the intial flush of jackets and repeated disturbance got most of them.


I let my cheap labor take over to suck up the stragglers. LOL



After all activity stopped this is what you have in the box. You can tell as when you hold the hose the jackets going through feels like so much popcorn. It's a good feeling.


They were in the duct so a good duct cleaning and an upsale of vent covers and all done.

BTW, don't forget the most important piece of equipment for a stinging insect job. The Ultrabreeze beesuit and gloves.

Applause... Applause... Standing O.

SET UP!!!! DID YOU CALL RICK BEFORE YOU POSTED?????JUST SAYIN!!!

I saw that one a mile away!!!LOL Rick

So the home owners that called you initially are not the ones you ended up doing the removal for.....how difficult was it to convince the owners of the actual problem, that they had a problema and to hire you to fix it?

Not at all difficult.

Thanks. I have a similar one to do. Ice water in a spray bottle drops them in their tracks. You could use that on any flyers coming back to the nest. Non-chemical = no pesticide license needed.