What Actually Happens

Before the visit

Three Things Worth Doing

Work out where the traffic goes. Not where individual wasps are — where the steady two-way line enters the building. Watch from a window for a minute. This is the single most useful thing you can do and it often saves the longest part of the visit.

Say if anyone reacts badly to stings. It changes how and when we attend and it is the most important thing you can tell us.

Say if you have already sprayed it. Not a telling-off. A nest that has been attacked is defended differently and the technician needs to know before walking up to it.

Beyond that: plan to keep people and pets indoors and away from that side of the building for a while, and close the windows nearest the nest.

Images on this page are illustrations only.

The treatment

Dust at the Entrance, and Why It Works

The method for a wasp nest is an insecticidal dust applied at and into the entrance, usually with a lance or a duster so it can be done from a distance.

The reason it is dust rather than spray is worth understanding, because it explains why a shop aerosol does not work. The dust sits at the entrance, every returning forager walks through it, and they carry it inside on their bodies and distribute it through the colony by contact. It reaches the parts of the nest nobody can see or get to, including the queen and the brood. You do not need to reach the nest; you need to reach the doorway.

That is also why it suits cavity nests, ground nests and nests deep in a roof void, where physically reaching the nest would mean opening up the structure.

The application itself takes a couple of minutes. Most of the visit is finding the entrance and getting safely into position.

Afterwards

Hours, Not Weeks

Activity usually drops sharply within a few hours. The colony is normally dead inside a day or two.

What you will see in between is returning foragers — wasps that were out when it happened, coming back to a nest that is no longer functioning. They mill about the entrance, they can look agitated, and they die off over the following day or so. It is expected and it is not a sign that the treatment failed.

Keep away from the entrance for the rest of the day. There is more on what to expect in the days after in after the treatment.

The nest itself

Why It Usually Stays

People often expect the nest to be taken away, and usually it is not. That is deliberate.

A wasp nest is used for one season only. Once the colony is dead nothing moves into it, it does not rot into anything unpleasant, and it is simply an empty paper shell. Cutting a dead nest out of a wall cavity, a roof void or a soffit means opening up the structure and making good afterwards, for no benefit at all.

Where the nest is somewhere it genuinely cannot stay — hanging in a porch, in a loft about to be converted, in a shed you are clearing — it can be taken away once it is dead. Ask on the day.

The one place removal is worth considering is a loft you use for storage, not because the nest is harmful but because a large dead nest is a nuisance to work around.

The guarantee

What It Covers

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.

That is a guarantee with a boundary, which is the useful kind. It covers the job not working — a colony that survives, or re-establishes at the same spot. It is not a promise that no wasp will ever nest on the property again, and no honest firm can offer that: a new queen next spring choosing the same good site is a new job, not a failure of this one.

If you are seeing real traffic at the same entrance a week later, ring. That is what it is for.

Short answers

Wasp Questions

Going further

Wasp Guides