I think there may have been an 11th plague that was going to be called down on Egypt, but Moses asked God to skip it. That plague was an attack by wasps and hornets. Locusts was a plague? Please. Wasps and hornets would rate as one of the highest plagues ever. Only the deaths of the first born would top it.

I remember wasps and hornets as a kid in Southwest Missouri. I got nailed a number of times on the farm, and when we moved to town I was mowing someone’s lawn, which resulted in me disturbing a yellowjacket nest. I took off running. It turns out that yellowjackets can fly faster than a scrawny 14 year-old boy can run. They finally left me alone after I ran about a thousand feet (I looked up the distance). I came back to the incomplete lawn with tears running down my face from the pain. I was taken to the doctor who pulled out over a 100 stingers, including many that were in my ear canal. That of course did not count when they just bit me. The doctor joked that I was clearly not allergic.

Honestly, I did not have much interaction with wasps from that time until I graduated from UMR in 1997. Flash forward to 2021 when I moved to our wonderful home in south-central Missouri. When we first moved in, there must have been over a thousand nests attached just to the house itself. That is not hyperbole. The wasp and hornet population was absolutely amazing. Furthermore, I guess Diversity is Their Strength. We generally find two kinds of paper-wasp nests, and three kinds of mud-dobber nests. I often think the mud-dobber nests are based on the story of the Three Little Pigs. One of the types of nests is a sloppy mess. It kind of looks like a no-bake cookie. Someone just made a ball of mud and threw it at a wall from about 15 feet away and called it good. That’s the little pig that built a house of straw.

The second one has a little more engineering to it. The tubes with the larvae are more obvious, and the total nest appears to be arranged in a dedicated direction. This is the house made of sticks. The last mud-dobber nest is a work of art. The tubes for the larvae are long and with no defect. There is a careful pattern to how the mud is deposited that looks like a master welder has laid an ornate TIG bead. It is definitely the house of bricks. I can remove the first two nests reasonably easily with my pocket knife, but the third nest takes a tremendous amount of work, and virtually always leaves evidence behind that it was there. Even when I am using the pressure washer I find the third nest doesn’t come completely off without scarring the logs on the house, or the steel in the ceilings.

Speaking of the pressure washer, it is my tool of choice for the mass cleaning of all the nests off the ceilings, porch rails, rock work, and window casings. The first three times I did the cleaning, I ended up looking like a mud monster. Also, I never cleaned them away unscathed. I always get attacked a few times no matter how much time I spend spraying poison on the jackasses or having some cold nights before the real cleaning. I have never heard of anything like this. I told the previous owner that I was waging war on the wasps and hornets back in 2021 and his response was, “good luck with that.”

I will say that I have made great strides in the war. I found a YouTube video of a guy who uses ascorbic acid in apple juice to lure wasps in for a drink, and then take it back to the nest and hopefully rub up on the queen. Their exoskeletons fall apart and they die. If the queen dies, the colony is done. The number of nests has seriously been reduced by at least 90%. I intend to build new bait stations this winter, and see if I can make them easier to manage from my end, and encourage more workers to visit them…

The war is far from over. Tiffany got nailed by one while watering plants a month ago and her hand swelled up like a small melon. A week ago I was working in the shop, and went to grab a paper towel from my Box o’ Towels sitting on top of a cabinet. I pulled on the end of the towels, and tore off about three of them. I wiped one of my hands, and wiped off the surface of whatever I was working on when my internal alarm systems sounded. I was hearing a strange buzzing noise and I thought something moved in my towels. I dropped the towels on the ground, and a wasp started crawling out. It had been working on a nest within the paper towels.

I then wiped up its remains with the towels. I had two bait stations at the house this year, but next year I am going to have about eight of them scattered around the property, including the shop.

I have had a couple of people tell me that wasps and hornets serve a purpose, and I confess that I have had some garden plants that were pollinated by wasps, not honey bees. I have also read that they feed on caterpillars, which would arguably turn into flying critters that would attack the garden plants. However, I have not yet seen any bald-faced hornets attacking the onslaught of Japanese beetles that eat our fruit trees each year, or the asian beetles that have invaded southern Missouri. So, I think I’ll be just fine with the wasp/hornet populations dropping to nearly nothing around our property. They can prove their worth other places…