Honey bees need everyone’s help since their numbers are still declining for reasons that haven’t been fully explained. In the pest control business, we are very careful to protect all pollinators (not just honey bees) whenever we have to apply insecticides near flowering plants.
VIEW MOREDigger wasps are solitary wasps which means that there is no colony with lots of workers. When there are many holes in an area, it is because other digger wasps are also attracted to the same type of soil conditions. Each ground burrow hole is about the diameter of a pencil and is the work of only one female wasp, although one female can dig multiple holes.
VIEW MOREA female mud dauber builds a nest all by herself (the male actually waits inside the nest) by gathering mud from pools and puddles. She rolls a piece into a ball and carries it in her jaws to be plastered onto the growing nest. As she constructs each of several nursery cells, she provisions them with a paralyzed spider and lays an egg.
VIEW MOREBaldfaced hornets make those large, football-sized, papery nests that you often see way up high in trees. The worker wasps capture insects and spiders to feed to the developing larvae in the nest. They don’t have the same foraging habits as other yellowjackets and so are less likely to interact with people and their food.
VIEW MOREA nest will continue to add worker wasps and grow in size and numbers until fall. A mature German yellowjacket nest can contain up to 4,000 wasps by midsummer. That means that your chances of interacting with yellowjackets around your deck will also increase as the summer progresses.
VIEW MOREa single female wasp begins the nest in the spring and cares for the first batch of young. Soon though, there will be more worker wasps that will continue with the nest building and care while even more wasps are added.
VIEW MOREAn integrated pest management (IPM) approach is often most effective when dealing with infestations of carpenter bees.
VIEW MORECarpenter bees are large (almost 1 inch), robust bees with a yellow, fuzzy thorax and a shiny black abdomen. If the black abdomen had also been fuzzy, that would mean a bumble bee, not a carpenter bee. I knew it was a male because he also had a yellow spot on his face, right between the eyes, a characteristic that only the male bee possesses.
VIEW MOREPut this recent record-setting cold and snowy winter aside for a moment. In just a short time, paper wasps will be out in force establishing new colonies for the spring. You might have noticed the swarming behavior of the two common species we have in the Northeast (Polistes fuscatus and Polistes dominula) around homes last
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