wasp traps

[stoneleighhouse]

saw a couple of wasps around the hives . Do wasp traps work?

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

yes

 

[local_beekeeper]

very well

 

[Luminos]

Absolutely

 

[tonybloke]

good ones do

 

[Dusty Rhodes]

Indubitably.

D

 

[Midland Beek]

***Wasp paranoia alert***

 

[Karol]

saw a couple of wasps around the hives . Do wasp traps work?

A word of caution;

The use of low efficiency traps frequently leads to hives being overwhelmed. Please note, efficiency is not the same as effectiveness.

Efficiency is the proportion of wasps caught by a trap that are killed. Effectiveness is how good a trap is at reducing the background population of wasps in the area to be protected.

Low efficiency traps kill far more wasps than high efficiency traps so they look busy and look great but they have two very big problems.

The first is they attract more wasps than they get rid of so they actually increase risk to bee hives. The second is that they help concentrate wasp attacks on hives.

If you have a low efficiency trap, for example a home made pop bottle trap or a jam jar trap, the trap will attract more wasps than it kills and the wasps will swarm feed on the trap. At some point, access to the trap will be denied, e.g. a layer of too many dead wasps, trap dries out, shear numbers of wasps, the trap gets moved etc. At this point, the feeding swarm will look for alternative food. If the swarm finds a hive the hive will find it far harder to defend itself because of the increased numbers of wasps involved attacking all at the same time. Without the low efficiency trap in the first place, the wasps would have approached the hives on an individual (scouting) basis and would be more easily overpowered.

Kind regards,

Karol

 

[stoneleighhouse]

thanks Karol for a really helpful reply

Regards

james

 

[Erichalfbee]

Well I used a Waspbane trap last year. A high efficiency trap that Karol describes. It caught fewer wasps than my array of bottle traps made the previous year but there were far fewer wasps at the hives. I will be recharging it this year. I'm sure the answer to wasp attack is a strong hive but I did have a weak hive and even they were largely left alone.
You have to deploy it properly though.....downwind of the hives before the main attacks start.

 

[masterBK]

So Karol, please name or describe a high efficiency trap?
I also notice that you don't have any hives so where does this experience of yours come from? I use large pop bottle as well as plastic milk bottle traps and find that four or five effectively keeps the wasp numbers under control in my out apiary. I measure effectiveness by checking to see if there are wasps trying to enter hives and whether there are any wasp corpses on the ground in front of the hive entrance. As I visit the apiary every week I can check and replace them as and when they start to fill up with dead decomposing wasps. I have never had one dry up yet possibly due to the hydroscopic nature of the contents?

 

[Ziggymole]

You don't really need to keep bees to know that a wasp trap that ATTRACTS wasps will increase the amount of wasps in an area - just look at the bins at picnic spots.

 

[Luminos]

So Karol, please name or describe a high efficiency trap?
I also notice that you don't have any hives so where does this experience of yours come from? I use large pop bottle as well as plastic milk bottle traps and find that four or five effectively keeps the wasp numbers under control in my out apiary. I measure effectiveness by checking to see if there are wasps trying to enter hives and whether there are any wasp corpses on the ground in front of the hive entrance. As I visit the apiary every week I can check and replace them as and when they start to fill up with dead decomposing wasps. I have never had one dry up yet possibly due to the hydroscopic nature of the contents?

I believe Karol invented the Wasp Bane trap

 

[Karol]

So Karol, please name or describe a high efficiency trap?
I also notice that you don't have any hives so where does this experience of yours come from? I use large pop bottle as well as plastic milk bottle traps and find that four or five effectively keeps the wasp numbers under control in my out apiary. I measure effectiveness by checking to see if there are wasps trying to enter hives and whether there are any wasp corpses on the ground in front of the hive entrance. As I visit the apiary every week I can check and replace them as and when they start to fill up with dead decomposing wasps. I have never had one dry up yet possibly due to the hydroscopic nature of the contents?

I'm obliged to respect the forum's rules so can't promote a particular trap. However, I have many years of experience studying wasps, studying integrated wasp management and studying the tools used to manage wasps (and by that I mean in depth scientific research) and a lot of that was done with bee keepers around the country. I am happy to share that experience because I believe bees need all the help they can get. Commercially the bee market is less than 0.5% of our turnover and that's not likely to ever change.

If your pop bottle traps are consistently busy then that is generally a sign that they are attracting more wasps than they kill. It doesn't matter where you place a low efficiency trap you will always get the same result because the trap will establish communication with each individual wasp nest that is contributing wasps to that area. Low efficiency traps are OK if one can guarantee that one can service them in a safe and timely fashion. It only takes that one day when one doesn't make it in time, or when one goes on holiday for a hive or two to then be overwhelmed.

By definition, if you kill a scouting wasp it cannot go back to the nest to recruit more wasps so by definition a high efficiency wasp trap will only kill a relatively small number of wasps. Placement of high efficiency traps is critical however because one has to intercept the scouting wasps before they get to the hive. That takes a little more understanding of wasp behaviour to anticipate it and wind direction plays a big part.

Similarily, if you place a high efficiency wasp trap right next to a low efficiency wasp trap, (say only three or four inches apart) then the high efficiency trap would not be expected to trap many wasps if any at all. This comes down to understanding that the wasps will swarm feed on the low efficiency wasp trap because of their point source navigation and programmed feeding behaviour following the escape of scouting wasps from such traps. Meanwhile all scouts caught in the high efficiency trap die so they can't communicate the point source location of the trap and therefore it looks to all intents and purposes as though it's a useless trap. Sadly, traps are frequently evaluated in this fashion and the wrong conclusions frequently drawn.

Anyway, if low efficiency traps work for you and you are comfortable with managing the risk then they work for you. It seems a lot of work though if you have to maintain them on a weekly basis if there are traps out there that don't need any (or very little) maintenance throughout the whole season bar possibly repositioning periodically to reflect changes in prevailing wind direction.

Kind regards,

Karol

 

[Erichalfbee]

Lots here from 2010 with lots from Karol too.
http://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=5818