Fighting the Hive

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Life is a fickle thing. It always amazes me how with a simple turn of events, even those most mundane aspects of our existence can detour us into the exciting. At the very least it can give us a funny story to tell. You wouldn't think that mowing the lawn would be that big of a deal. It's something that happens pretty much every week in the summer. At least until the drought hits and the grass starts to turn yellow. Actually, as you can see from the photo above, our is already a bit worse for wear.

Despite all the flooding across the nation it has been a really dry summer for us and yellow seems to be taking over the green more and more each day.

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My wife and I own about a quarter acre of land. When you subtract the square footage that our house, garage, patio, driveway, and storage shed takes up, that leaves a small patch of lawn to mow. It takes me about 30 to 40 minutes to push mow the whole thing. It's not too bad and it gives me the chance to get some exercise and more steps in each day. My mower isn't one of those self propelled ones, it's just a standard 21" Cub Cadet that you see in the photo above.

So I was doing my regular mowing run a couple of weeks ago when I started to trim around the tree you see in the photos. If you look really really closely, you might see something else besides the tree. As I was making my third pass or so, I suddenly started to hurt on various parts of my body. It didn't quite register at first what was happening, but then I realized I was getting stung by bees. I quickly left the mower and made a run for it towards the garage.

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Turns out there was a massive yellow jacket nest sitting in the tree. The funny thing is, I had zero problems the week before when I trimmed around this tree. So either the bees worked really really fast, or I didn't disturb it enough last time for them to come out and play.

This time I basically walked right through it and they weren't happy at all. I ended up getting stung about five or six times and thankfully I am not allergic to bee stings otherwise it might have been bad. @mrsbozz still made me sit for a bit just to make sure I didn't swell up or anything because honestly I can't remember the last time I was stung by a bee.

I say "bee", but really yellow jackets are a type of wasp and they are not pollinators, so I determined it was only right that I should eradicate them with extreme prejudice.

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I used up what was left of my wasp spray and put a pretty big dent in the hive. Luckily I managed to keep from getting stung again, they weren't too happy about our play date. As you can see from the photos, the hive was pretty massive and they had a good number of larva in the works. I left the hive on the ground thinking a possum would come along and have a nice meal at night, but when I checked on the hive the next morning it was still there and there were yellow jackets on it trying to salvage as much as they could.

Since I was out of spray, I grabbed some delta dust which is a dessicant that slowly kills the whole hive as they carry it back with them into the main part. I sprayed it all over the bits on the ground and after a few days I was able to pick them up and throw them in the trash.

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There were still bits of the old nest in the tree and I'll be danged if the yellow jackets weren't still trying to rebuild the stupid thing. I sprayed it over a period of a couple days and eventually I was able to pull the remaining bits out of the tree.

@bozz - 1
Yellow Jackets - 0

Case closed right?

Not quite!

@mrsbozz was looking out our front window the other day and she was looking at the tree that sits right in front of our house. Sure enough, I watched the tree for a bit and I could see a steady stream of yellow jackets coming and going from inside the canopy.

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As you can see, it's a pretty "full" decorative tree, so it's not crazy to think that we would have missed a nest being built in there, but we pull weeds from under this tree all the time and have never been bothered which kind of shocks me.

@tarazkp suggested we eliminate the wasps with fire, but as you can see from the next photo, it's a beautiful tree when it blooms in the spring, so I would hate to do too much damage to it.

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beautiful right?

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Luckily, I got some more wasp spray from Amazon and I have already started my assault on hive 2. You can see the white on the leaves from the delta dust that I tried to spray in the entrance after I hit it with the traditional spray. Yellow jackets were dropping on the ground like rain. You could actually hear the pitter pat of them falling onto the rocks below after I sprayed it the first time.

As you can see from the circled area, this hive is as big if not bigger than the other one, so it's been about a week that I have been fighting this thing. I finally cracked it open the other day with a ill advised broom handle whack. That gave me the opportunity to spray some more delta dust into the heart of the hive. I'm going to leave it for the weekend and then re-evaluate on Sunday, but hopefully I will just need to clean it out of the tree and finally be done with the bastards.

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My Sports Account - @bozz.sports

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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or @mrsbozz unless otherwise sourced