A colony of Yellowjacket wasps moved into a gap somewhere inside our front door, which we noticed only after they set up a heavy traffic pattern over the front step. The nest is far enough up inside the door frame (or, shudder, the wall) to be immune to rattlecan insecticide spray and the wasps simply tiptoe across sticky-trap sheets laid on their entrance paths.
Taking a hint from the comments to our long-ago fruit fly adventure, I conjured a Wasp Blower from available materials:
That’s a hulking 12 V electronics case fan mounted on a cardboard bulkhead inside what’s basically a tunnel, with its power supply plugged into a widowmaker extension cord screwed into the light fixture next to the door.
The fan blows away from the door, with the general idea of killing wasps leaving the nest. Arriving wasps can walk home around the box, but departing wasps always take flight from the small crack under the door sill, whereupon they’re sucked into the fan, shattered by the blades, and blown out onto the step.
A Yellowjacket can make headway into a 1 m/s wind, but not for very long, which explains why most of them prefer walking home.
The carnage looks awful, so it seems to be working …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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10 responses to “Wasp Blower”
[…] day after I set up the Wasp Blower, the carnage was terrible to […]
Very clever! You might want to supplement this with a very simple DIY trap, shown in this YT video by Shawn Woods (the “mousetrap guy”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FhifTGKtUQ
That’s impressive!
We declared victory yesterday after two weeks; the soapy water trap looks like it should work both faster and quieter.
With a bit of luck, there won’t be a Next Time, but that one is definitely on the to-do list.
Thanks for the pointer!
Good move not spraying it, that likely won’t kill many and if their only entrance is full of poison then they’ll burrow deeper to find another – into your house! A bug zapper also works really well, once one starts sizzling then the party really gets going!
Hi Dave, Can you link to a specific wasp bug zapper to hang about 1 story up? Mine seems to only pickup gnats and maybe some mosquitoes. Fly Zapper rackets work, but that is with man-in-the-loop. Then there is the fear factor after a swing and a miss.
Hi. You make me feel like I’m overcomplicating things. LOL. My wasps are 1 story up, not low to the ground like yours. A bing search for “wooden 3/4-5 acme” found your 2013 Broom Handle Screw Thread: Replacement Plug OpenSCAD model, which I want to screw into this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F7LJD764 and attach to a camera tripod for pan tilt. I need to add a 1/4-20 female (where your bore hole is on the unthreaded end) to accept the typical tripod camera attachment. Then I planned to attach 2 servos to the tripod for pan tilt and a 3rd to depress the wasp spray can. All controlled by an ESP32-CAM with targeting adjustments, if it will function as advertised. (My Chinese stock seems unreliable and I’m hoping my DFRobot module will actually work). Then there is Dave’s concern, which I’ve heard before, about burrowing deeper into the house!
I’ve used the WHY trap in Steve’s video. It did kill many wasps and we saw in increase in spiders that year due to wasps not preying on the spiders I suppose. Also tried the meat, wood plank and water tub. No luck with that one. Depends on season; sugar water vs meat. The sticky traps in another of his videos will also catch lizards or critters you may not want to harm.
All that to ask, although the above is a fun project for me, can you advise an alternative two-week solution like you did (instead of my doomed to failure attempt) for my case instead? Actually 4 locations are 1 story up, another 2 are 2 stories up. I suppose the 2 stories up cases can use the amazon product as intended. But I’ve only been stung by the 1 story positions.
Get better soon, “Dances”. Covid is still a thing? My Indian name is “Sleeps All Day”.
Thanks.
If those nests are exposed, the can-on-a-pole gadget should work fine: one or two good spray sessions and they’re done.
If they’re inside the structure up there, then AFAICT there are no good DIY choices. Standing on a ladder while fiddling with a blower makes no sense and, for sure, debugging some rickety microcontroller / servo widget will be even worse. :grin:
Even I would call in the professionals for that job …
Of course, with my luck they are not exposed. Oh, I called the professionals for my “inside the structure” case. They wanted to sell me a subscription which the first application had no effect anyway.In light of Dave’s comment (burrowing deeper), I forgot to add that I noticed about 1 minute after I sprayed once, another wasp walked out onto the dried spray taking up his sentry position with no concern for poison. So that is why I wanted an active targeting setup. As long as the wasps don’t consider the entry full of poison, they can come out and get sprayed until the nest starves (I’m hoping). So, it looks like the even worse solution has a go. I’m looking at sawing this off https://www.walmart.com/ip/969076664 instead of trying a 3D print.
Apparently insecticidal dust is a thing and seems to be what (real) professionals use for protracted killing power, but it’s not clear we civilians can buy such things.
Good hunting …
I had a yellow jacket infestation on a wall of a house many moons ago. I was given a solution by an old beekeeper, which was to put Carbaryl/Sevin on the entrance to the yellow jacket nest. When I watched him apply the Carbaryl, he used a rubber puffer ball bulb with the straw coming out of it. The bulb was filled with the pesticide, and every puff made a little cloud of the pesticide powder.
He claimed it worked because the yellow jackets would track the pesticide into the nest. Then they would take turns cleaning it off of each other, and spread around the inside of the nest.
If you use this technique, please be safe and use proper precautions to not trigger an attack from the Yellowjacket nest.