If you have ever tried to do any type of work outdoors chances are you have come across yellow jackets. Not the Georgia Tech ones, but the more aggravating little wasps (although they look like bees), that like to live in the ground and fly up your pants leg stinging every freaking part of your body they come in contact with.
Now if you go searching on some liberal leaning website, they’re going to tell you that yellow jackets are beneficial insects and that you should protect them. Beneficial to masochists that like getting stung by wasps, maybe. Apparently some of these idiots have never been working in their yard and mowed the grass in close proximity to a yellow jacket nest, or have never cut firewood and stirred up a yellow jacket nest.
Although they are often mistaken for their cousins the Guinea Wasp which looks like a slightly longer version of the yellow jacket and build a regular hanging wasp nest.
Yellow jackets build nests that look a lot like a hornet’s except instead of in a tree or on a building theirs is usually completely underground, although there have been some cases where the nest was built in the trunk of an old abandoned car or a hollow tree.
Usually they are not noticeable until late Summer and early Fall that is when the workers are gathering most of the food and adding on to the nest.
When defending the nest yellow jackets attack in swarms. Usually causing the offending animal or human to immediately leave the vicinity, or in some human cases, causing you to run blindly into trees or trip over logs injuring yourself further.
So how do you locate these pesky little suckers you might ask.
Go ahead ask.
Okay glad you asked, their are two really simple ways to locate their nests.
One is you simply look around a wooded area for them and when you locate several you watch them, they will eventually go back into the hole they came out of allowing you to see where they go in and out of the ground.
The other is just stomp around in the woods until they swarm your ass and then try to remember where you were when they attacked. I do not recommend this way.
As far as wasp and bees go the yellow jacket sting is not the worst, in my experience red wasp and hornets have that covered.
Yellow jacket stings are usually slightly painful, followed by itching (that’s the worst part of it), however if you are allergic to bee or wasp stings they could be fatal as like I said before they swarm and you usually get stung multiple times.
Getting rid of them however is pretty simple also.
Once you locate the nest, you simply use something like a pyrethrum aerosol to kill them, the best way is to mark the location and spray the aerosol into the nest at night that way they are all inside.
Some people pour gasoline in the nest which does kill them but runs the risk of fire or explosion if any source of fire is around before the vapors evaporate.
Sometimes you may have to treat the nest more than once to kill them all.