Wasps’ Nests

Destroyed £32.00

Harrier wasps’ nest control cope with wasps’ nests through the entire Harrier area for a fixed charge of only £32.00, 7 days each week including evenings and bank holidays. (Postcode areas CH, CW & L £44.50 due to increased traveling)

Wasps Nest

Harrier wasps’ nest control won’t charge more or push the cost up once we arrive on-site and we work in the evenings, therefore it is not a problem to visit you once you finish work or at weekends etc. And the price is still £32.00. It won’t change!

(The only exception is in the case of a late season wasps’ nest, from September onwards, where an additional treatment to your loft may be necessary.)

Identification

Firstly, please ensure that you really do have a wasps’ nest, you’d be surprised how often we are called out to what’s meant to be a wasps’ nest and it turns out to be bees, particularly solitary bees in the spring.

When you have a wasps’ nest you will notice plenty of wasps coming and going from one hole, if they’re solitary bees they’ll be entering a lot of holes everywhere in the brickwork, particularly airbricks and drainage holes in plastic window frames. These solitary bees are harmless and stingless and no treatment methods are possible or necessary.

As a rule of thumb you won’t have an active wasps’ nest until at the very least late May because of the biology of the wasp. Any noticed before mid-May will be bees with no shadow of a doubt.

Few insects stimulate quite as much concern as the wasp with lots of people responding very badly to their stings. Unfortunately each year in the UK people do die because of being stung by wasps, often after unintentionally disturbing the nest.

Professional wasps` nest control

Destroying A Wasps Nest

If you discover that you’ve a wasps’ nest then please call Harrier wasps’ nest control instantly. Don’t make an effort to tackle the nest yourself, it’s very dangerous and you might endure many stings. Also, and more importantly don’t attempt to close the nest entry with mastic or mortar etc., you’ll drive the wasps into the house and also when we arrive we require the entrance to be open so as to perform the treatment.

Over the majority of the summer months eliminating a wasps’ nest is generally a straightforward matter of treating it using a little bit of pesticide and returning wasps distribute it about the inside of the nest, inside an hour or so the entire nest is dead.

As with any other pest management firm Harrier wasps’ nest control don’t actually remove a wasps’ nest, we merely destroy it, there’s nothing to be gained from it, the nest is simply paper and will fall apart away with time.

Harrier wasps’ nest control will attempt to deal with your wasps’ nest with a same day service if at all possible but certainly within two days at most. We work until sundown each day but if you need to have a nest treated while you are out you can pay us online via paypal. Click here to go to our specialist website and look for the paypal button in the sidebar. Be sure to call and tell us you have paid and let us know where on your property the nest is. We will need you to leave open any gates we have to go through to access the nest.

Harrier wasps’ nest control have a set charge of only £32.00 and when there is a second nest on a single property then your second wasps’ nest will be treated at no cost. A third or any subsequent nests will be treated at a supplemental fee of £10 each. Nests on adjoining premises are charged at the full £32.00.

Please ensure before calling us that you do have a wasps’ nest and what you’re seeing aren’t solitary bees. If we call out to what turn out to be solitary bees then there is nothing to be done as they are stingless and harmless and we will charge you a £25 call out fee. This is especially likely to be the case with any ‘wasps’ that you see before June.

Nest Development through the season

Wasp

A wasps’ nest starts at the end of spring usually around April when the queens emerge from hibernation and begin nest constructing. In contrast to honey bees, only queens survive the winter months, the remainder of the colony having died off the previous winter.

The queen develops a tiny nest from ‘wasp paper’, which she creates by combining decaying wood with saliva.

This initial nest is about the dimensions of a golf ball, inside it she lays approximately 20 eggs which hatch out into larvae. These she nourishes with aphids and grubs until they pupate and hatch into fully fledged wasps. These young wasps will then take control of nest building while the queen will stay within the nest laying eggs.

This entire process requires a few weeks and it’s unusual indeed to find a wasps’ nest prior to June. The busiest period of nest development is generally the month of June and Harrier wasps’ nest control always estimate that the wasping season usually starts about the 3rd week in June.

Wasps`nest

If left to its own devices the nest continues to develop over the summer and based on weather and accessibility to food will contain between 5000 – 30,000 wasps at its peak.

When the worker wasps feed the larvae within the nest they’re rewarded by the larvae which exude a sweet sticky material that the wasps crave and therefore this is their motivation to look after their young.

Up to around August time the nest creates only sterile females but as the days begin to draw in it makes its last batch of larvae which are new queens and males. Typically a nest will generate about two thousand new queens.

Naturally these new queens will mate and after that hibernate for the winter months.

It’s at this point when wasps tend to be their most problematic. When the nest is no longer creating young, the worker wasps are missing out on their sweet fix and begin needing sweet foods. They begin feeding on fermenting fruit and as they are essentially out of work they turn into a nuisance pest. It is now when most stings occur.

It’s also the moment when coping with a wasps’ nest becomes significantly more difficult since the when the queens come out they will no longer go back to the nest and so are not eliminated by any pesticide inside it.

At this stage of the year we have many reports of individuals getting a large number of wasps within their houses each day, these are the new queens searching for hibernating sites.

Many Local Authorities at this point of the season will tell enquirers to leave the nest alone as ‘it should go away soon’. This is often actually the very worst thing that can be done since the queens will emerge making the complete process more difficult.

Once this process has started, generally from mid-September, it is usually essential to perform additional work, for example smoking or fogging the attic to eliminate these queens which naturally carries additional charges. The best recommendation Harrier wasps’ nest control can provide is when you’ve got a wasps’ nest get it eliminated before September and this will save you lots of trouble.

Left to its own devices a wasps nest can survive up until the first main freeze of wintertime, they survive later in to the the autumn months than some people expect. Harrier wasps’ nest control typically tackle a number of wasps’ nests even into late November and December and the latest we’ve handled an active nest was Xmas eve!

When the cold season comes the queens hibernate and all the other wasps, workers and males, die out. The nest itself is then spent, it will never be used again and consequently there isn’t any benefit at all in attempting to remove it.

More about wasps

European Hornet

A wasps’ stinger is a modified ovipositor and for that reason only female wasps can sting but few would like to take a risk on guessing the right sex of the wasp confronting them.

In Great Britan we now have three varieties of pest wasps, Vespula vulgaris or the common wasp, the German wasp, Vespula germanica and a recent import from Europe which established itself here in the 80s Dolichovespula media. There are more species in Britain however they don’t trouble us as unwanted pests.

We have the European hornet, Vespa crabro in Britain, mostly limited to the southerly counties but Harrier wasps’ nest control did cope with a hornets’ nest within the Knutsford area in the summer of 2012, however it was the first we’d ever encountered this far north.

There is no need for Harrier wasps’ nest control to distinguish the species of wasp we’re eradicating to be able to destroy the wasps’ nest. All of the pest species have a similar biology and react to exactly the same treatment.

What governs the quantity and size of wasps’ nests isn’t the harshness of the prior winter but the weather in the spring. The hibernating queens can survive any amount of cold however the worst of all scenario for them is exactly what happened in 2012.

There was a remarkably early warm interval for around 6 weeks from mid-February and throughout March. This brought the wasp queens from hibernation early but unfortunately for them it turned cold and wet and then there wasn’t any food for them so they starved. As a result the summer of 2012 became a bad summer for wasps.