Keeping Them Off the Table

First

Work Out Whether You Even Have a Nest

Wasps around your food do not mean a nest on your property. Foragers travel hundreds of metres, so in late summer you can have a constant nuisance with the nearest nest three gardens away or in a tree on a verge.

The test is traffic. A nest produces a steady two-way stream to one fixed point on a building or in the ground, in a fairly straight line, all day. Wasps circling a table, a bin or fallen fruit is a food pattern, not a nest pattern.

If it is a food pattern, nothing on this page costs £90 and nothing on it requires us.

Images on this page are illustrations only.

The bins

The Single Biggest Lever

More late-summer wasp nuisance comes from bins than from anything else, and it is the easiest thing to change.

• Lids shut. Obvious, and routinely not done in hot weather because of the smell.
• Rinse anything sweet before it goes in — juice cartons, jam jars, beer and cider bottles. A rinsed recycling box is dramatically less interesting.
• Move the bins away from where you sit, and away from the back door if you can.
• Bag food waste rather than tipping it in loose.

None of that is exciting and together it makes more difference than anything you can buy.

The fruit

Windfalls Are the Other Half

If you have an apple, plum, pear or damson tree, the fallen fruit under it is a wasp magnet from August onwards, and fermenting windfalls produce the slow, blundering wasps that are most likely to sting by accident.

Picking up windfalls every few days through late summer changes the character of a garden more than people expect. Composting them is fine if the heap has a lid or gets covered; an open heap of soft fruit is just a bigger version of the problem.

The same goes for a fruiting hedge, fallen figs, and the sugary mess under a lime tree in a hot summer.

At the table

Small Things That Work

• Never drink from an open can outdoors in late summer. A wasp inside a can is how people get stung in the mouth, which is the one sting situation that can be genuinely dangerous. Use a glass, or a bottle with a narrow neck, or a lid.
• Cover food until people eat, and clear plates as soon as they are finished rather than at the end.
• Do not flap. Swatting and waving is read as an attack and a wasp can sting repeatedly. Stay still, or move away calmly and let it lose interest.
• Wipe the table. Spilled juice, jam and beer are what brings the next one.
• Watch children's hands and faces after ice cream, which is the commonest way a child gets stung.

Traps and the things that do not work

Where to Put One, and What to Ignore

A wasp trap — a jar of sweet liquid with a one-way entry — does catch wasps. The mistake is where people hang it.

A trap is an attractant. Put it near the table and you have invited more wasps to the table, some of which will stop at you on the way. The only sensible placement is well away from where people sit — the far end of the garden, downwind, near the bins rather than near the seating — so it draws traffic away.

Things that do not work, in the order people try them: a brown paper bag pretending to be a rival nest, which wasps ignore; ultrasonic devices, which do nothing to insects; hanging a plastic bag of water; and most plug-in or spray repellents, which at best work for minutes.

Citronella and similar have a mild and very short-lived effect at close range. They are not a plan.

And if it turns out there is a nest, that is £90 with no call-out fee, and the table problem usually goes with it.

Short answers

Wasp Questions

Going further

Wasp Guides