Wasp Control

First question

Is It Actually a Wasp Nest?

A British wasp nest is a closed grey-brown ball made of chewed wood pulp, with fine horizontal banding across the surface and one entrance hole, usually underneath. You cannot see the cells. They are inside, under that shell.

That matters because a lot of pictures online show something else — an open honeycomb on a stalk, with the cells visible. That is a paper wasp, a southern European and American insect, and it is not what you have.

The other reliable tell is traffic. A established nest has a steady two-way stream at one point: wasps arriving and leaving from the same spot, all day, in a fairly straight line. One wasp at a window is a lost wasp. Twenty going in and out of the same gap under the eaves is a nest.

1. 1The envelope. Layers of chewed wood pulp, built up like papier mâché and banded in grey and brown. This is all you see from outside, and it is why a British nest looks like a smooth ball rather than a honeycomb.
2. 2The combs. Horizontal tiers of cells hanging inside, one above the other, with the grubs in them. You cannot see these unless the nest is broken open — which is the single commonest reason people think they have something other than a wasp nest.
3. 3One entrance. Usually a single hole near the bottom. Everything goes in and out of it, which is what makes a steady two-way stream the giveaway, and it is why treatment at the entrance reaches the whole colony.
4. 4The attachment. A short stalk fixing the nest to a rafter, a branch, a joist or the underside of a soffit. In a cavity or underground there is no stalk visible and no nest visible either.

If you cannot see a nest at all but there is a steady stream going into a gap in the brickwork, an airbrick or a roof vent, that is still a nest. It is just inside the wall or the roof where you cannot see it, which changes some things about the job but not the price.

Images on this page are illustrations only.

The clock

It Will Die By November. That Is Not Always Enough.

A wasp colony lasts one year and one year only. A single queen starts it in April or May, the colony grows all summer, and at the first hard frosts the whole thing dies. Next year's queens have already left to hibernate somewhere else. The nest is never used again.

So "will it go away on its own?" has an honest answer, which is yes, in November. Whether that helps depends entirely on where it is.

What the clock does change is the size of the job. Roughly:

• May and June — a golf ball to a tennis ball, a queen and a handful of workers. Barely defended. The easiest and safest moment there will ever be.
• July — a melon, several hundred workers, and now it is defended properly.
• August and September — a football or bigger, several thousand workers, and the colony is at its most aggressive. This is when most people ring.

The treatment is the same job at any of those stages and the price does not change. What changes is the risk while it is still there, and how much of your garden or loft you have lost in the meantime. If you have spotted a small nest in June, that is the cheap moment to deal with it in every sense except the invoice.

What we do

The Treatment, and Why the Nest Usually Stays Put

Worth knowing before anyone arrives, because it surprises people. Treating a nest and removing a nest are not the same thing.

The treatment is an insecticidal dust applied at and into the nest entrance. Wasps walk through it on the way in and carry it through the colony on their bodies, which reaches the parts nobody can get to, including the queen. Activity usually drops within hours and the colony is normally dead inside a day or two, though you will see returning foragers for a while after that — they have nowhere to go and they die off.

The nest itself is generally left where it is, and that is deliberate rather than lazy. It is annual, so nothing will move back into it, and an empty nest is harmless. Cutting a dead nest out of a wall cavity or a roof can mean opening up the structure for no benefit. Where it is somewhere it genuinely cannot stay — a nest in a loft you are about to convert, or one hanging in a porch — it can be taken away once it is dead. Ask on the day.

The guarantee is specific, which is the useful kind. In the firm's own words: if the wasps return to the same nest location, they come back and re-treat at no extra cost.

Images on this page are illustrations only.

The price

Ninety Pounds, and What That Covers

Wasp nest treatment is £90, fixed, with no call-out fee. It is the only service on this site with a published price, and that is because it is the only one that is genuinely the same job every time: one nest, one visit, done.

That price includes the visit, the treatment and the guarantee. It does not change because the nest is in a loft rather than a shed, or because it is August rather than June.

Where it can change is access. A nest at normal ladder height is the standard job. A nest four floors up, or one that needs a tower or a cherry picker, is a different piece of work and anything extra is agreed with you before it happens, not afterwards. Same for more than one nest on a property.

Same-day appointments are available, and evenings and weekends at no additional cost.

Not everything that buzzes

If It Is a Honeybee, We Will Say So

This costs us bookings and it is still the right answer.

Honeybees are not a pest control job. If a swarm has landed in your garden — a seething cluster the size of a rugby ball, hanging off a branch or a fence post — that wants a local beekeeper, not us, and most will collect a swarm for nothing because they want the bees. A swarm is usually gone within a day or two anyway.

Bumblebees nest in small numbers in compost heaps, bird boxes and under decking, they are not aggressive, and the colony dies out by late summer like a wasp colony does. Leave them.

Solitary bees — the ones coming out of holes in mortar or in a lawn — have no colony to defend and almost never sting. Leave them too.

Telling them apart is easier than it sounds: wasps are smooth and shiny with a hard bright-yellow and black pattern and an obvious thin waist. Bees look furry and matt, and are browner. There is a fuller guide in honeybees are not a wasp job.

Where they turn out to be

Seven Places, and One of Them Is Not the Building

Over a season the same short list accounts for nearly all of it.

• The loft or roof space, hung from a rafter or the felt. The commonest of all.
• Under the eaves or behind the soffit, entering at a gap or a vent.
• Inside a wall cavity, entering at an airbrick, a weep hole or a crack in the mortar. You never see the nest.
• A shed, garage or outbuilding, often in the roof apex.
• Underground, in an old rodent burrow or a bank — a hole in the lawn with steady traffic and no nest in sight.
• In a hedge or dense shrub, particularly conifer. Frequently found by whoever is cutting it, which is a bad way to find it.
• A bird box, a bin store, a rolled-up parasol, a barbecue cover — anything sheltered and undisturbed since spring.

You do not need to find it before ringing. Where the traffic goes is enough to start with, and finding the nest is part of the visit.

Images on this page are illustrations only.

Three things not to do

Especially the First One

Do not block the entrance. This is the one that causes real damage. Wasps that cannot get out of a wall cavity will chew a new way out, and the new way out is often into the room on the other side. Filling an airbrick or a gap in the mortar with foam or cement while a colony is alive behind it is how a garden problem becomes an indoor one. Treat first, block afterwards.

Do not do it off a ladder. Most serious wasp injuries are not from the stings, they are from the fall. A defending colony arrives faster than you can climb down, and you will be holding a rung when it does.

Do not spray it and walk away. A shop aerosol reaches the entrance and perhaps the outer layer. It is enough to convince the colony it is under attack and not enough to end it, and the defended radius round that nest gets considerably wider for the rest of the day. If you have already tried it, say so when you book — it is not a telling-off, it genuinely changes how the technician approaches the nest.

Images on this page are illustrations only.

Going further

Wasp Guides

Short answers

Wasp Questions

One Last Thing

If you are not sure whether it is wasps or bees, or you can see traffic but no nest, ring and describe what you are seeing and where it is going. There is no call-out fee, and the answer to the bee question is free either way.