There is this vented box on the side of my home. Do any of you know what this is for?
Exhaust from an appliance? Could be the dryer, bathroom fan, good vent from the kitchen or just an outlet for central air.
Good call! I knew it had to be an air vent, however, I didnāt know to what. After reading your suggestions I went outside to check. It lines up perfectly with the fireplace.
A wasp is making a nest in that thing. Do I need to be concerned? I never use the fireplace.
Itās for air-intake, if it is on your fireplace/chimney. Itās to provide air for a gas-burning fireplace.
If you donāt kill the wasps, that nest will just continue to get bigger. Do it at night, after they have all ācome homeā. Go out with a flashlight, hit them with a really good shot of foaming wasp killer, and get out of the area.
If you do it in the daytime, they wonāt all be at the nest, and as soon as you hit the nest with wasp killer, the wasps will instantly return to the nest to find out whatās wrong, and who to sting.
I was concerned they might be a problem. OK. Tonight they die!
I found even regular household insect killing spray worked fine to get rid of wasps. I went completely over the top spraying a wasps nest though to be sure. One of them had stung my mum.
The wasp spray I am talking about shoots 20 feet. I donāt want to be closer than that.
This topic makes me wonder if thereās a way to move a (small) wasp nest without killing them (I like insects!).
A quick Google search told me this:
Wait until evening when the wasps have returned to the nest and are sleeping. Take a plastic or paper container with a lid and fit the container over the nest. Use the lid or a stiff piece of cardboard and slide it between the cup and the spot where the nest is attached, severing the connection. The nest should drop into the container.
Put the lid on and move the nest away from your home. Let it sit, covered, for about an hour, then go back and carefully remove the lid.
This will get the nest off your house without killing the wasps. Also there is no way of reattaching the nest to a structure, and the wasps wonāt be able to do so either.
Fortunately, wasp nests last only one season. Unlike honey bees, that build and maintain hives for a number of years, wasps build their nests, raise some offspring and new queens, and then the nest dies out. Only the queen will survive, and she will find a safe place to hibernate through the winter, re-emerging in the spring to start constructing a new nest.
@Uni2ONE2 Same here! I would get one that had a 100 foot range if they sold that.
Me too. However, I donāt like them enough to take risk. These are red wasp. Any part of the body they sting becomes temporarily paralyzed. Not 100% but bad enough that I wouldnāt want to experience that again. Meanwhile, I donāt see a way to open the vent at all. It looks like a permanent structure.
Also Iād say make sure your spray killer is not flammable, not the worse thing in the world if a bit ends up in the tubes as itāll burn fairly easily but Iād say have the fire off when spraying and let it sit for a bit before turning on just to let it dry out.
It shouldnāt be a problem. My mother ruined the fireplace when she was alive. Now, it is unusable.
I like to use wd40 to kill wasps. Itās quite effective and I suspect itās considerably less toxic than most bee killers.