Wasp traps

[sandysman]

Not wanting to hijack Veg's post, (commiserations Veg), where IS the best place to deploy wasp traps. I know that Drstritson posted some negative remarks recently regarding the placing of traps in close proximity to the hives but our most experienced beekeeper at my local association says the opposite and places his traps on and around the hives.
Thanks in anticipation.
Andy

 

[beeno]

Hi Sandysman,
Not read the other post. However, I find mouse guards reduces the incident of wasps getting through dramatically!

 

[BeeJayBee]

... where IS the best place to deploy wasp traps. I know that Dristone posted some negative remarks recently regarding the placing of traps in close proximity to the hives but our most experienced beekeeper at my local association says the opposite and places his traps on and around the hives.

Current thinking, and the forum's wasp expert, suggests that traps should be placed away from hives otherwise there's a risk of attracting wasps to where you don't want them to be. (I hope I'm not misquoting Karol or trampling on his area of expertise)

 

[theeggman]

I think the "experts" input was to move the attacked colony/ hive and replace with a trap.

I stand to be corrected.

Tim.

 

[poshpikey]

I'm not an expert but when I set a load of jam jar traps around my hives the one that caught by far the most was the one that was set up about one cm under the reduced entrance of the hive being attacked.

 

[eddyh]

Noticed a lot of wasp activity around my hives the last few days, so hung some plastic pop bottles up in the fruit trees around the hives with the tops cut off and inverted back in the bottle, inside i put a drop of syrup a little vinegar a couple of grapes and some lemon juice, "yum yum" every day they're full to the brim with the little buggers.And these are hung about 8 or 9 feet away,still get the odd wasp hanging around but nothing to worry about.

 

[Karol]

Current thinking, and the forum's wasp expert, suggests that traps should be placed away from hives otherwise there's a risk of attracting wasps to where you don't want them to be. (I hope I'm not misquoting Karol or trampling on his area of expertise)

That's very kind of you BeeJoyful but I'm not sure I deserve such an accolade when most of the jury is not just out but gone on an indefinite adjournment!

Protecting hives from wasps is not an easy thing to do and requires a detailed understanding of wasp behaviour, trap design and what I call IWM (integrated wasp management) strategies.

I know that a lot of bee keepers are having difficulties at the moment so I will try to help as best I can.

The first thing to understand is that wasp traps fall into one of two camps. They are either low efficiency (i.e. allow wasps to enter, feed and then escape) or high efficiency (i.e. kill 100% of the wasps that they catch).

These are three examples of low efficiency traps:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xllp6LCgFQ"]Wasp bottle trap showing escaping wasps - YouTube[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs0KRE041lk"]Wasp (Tub) Trap Clip.mp4 - YouTube[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_L1pXXHzbI"]Wasp Pot.mp4 - YouTube[/ame]

I'm afraid forum rules mean I can't show you video clips of a high efficiency trap.

Low efficiency traps don't help no matter whether you place them near or away from hives. I've been running a poll on forum which shows that there appears to be no benefit in using low efficiency traps, i.e. the distribution of traps is the same relative proportion in the group that lost a hive (or hives) to the group which didn't. This is consistent with our own research not just with hives but other applications as well.

High efficiency traps are used in one of two ways depending on the nature of the problem, i.e. whether you have to deal with scouting wasps or swarm feeding wasps and it can be difficult to tell the difference at times.

Scouting wasps are essentially individual wasps that are looking for a food source which they have yet to report back to the nest. Swarm feeding wasps are wasps which have been recruited by a scout to a particular food source. Once wasps start swarm feeding on that food source then they will keep coming back to that food source until it is exhausted. We call this programmed feeding.

So, with scouting wasps the strategy is to intercept scouts arriving at the hive to prevent them returning to their nest to recruit more wasps. This means placing the trap either on top of the hive or immediately in front of the entrance to the hive before swarm feeding becomes established.

If swarm feeding has become established then other strategies have to be adopted. Essentially, the progammed feeding has to be interrupted, i.e. the food source on which the wasps are feeding must be removed or made unavailable and simultaneously, the wasps have to be caught and killed. If feeding is interrupted without mopping up the wasps then they will simply start looking for an alternative food source and will either find the hive again if relocated or find an alternative hive.

Best way to interrupt programmed feeding is to either seal the hive for a short period and place a high efficiency wasp trap directly in front of the sealed entrance or to move the hive a couple of feet and simultaneously place the high efficiency wasp trap exactly in the same place as the original position of the entry to the hive. After a couple of hours the high efficiency wasp trap should have mopped up the swarm feeding wasps and should then be moved to the interception location to protect the hive from further scouting wasps.

Reducing the entrance to a hive and using a glass pane are a part of IWM. The pane of glass should be placed in front of the hive so that it makes contact along the length of the landing platform and the wall of the high just beneath the roof which will create a triangular gap on each side of the hive. It's best that the glass pane doesn't come into contact with the ground otherwise the scent from the hive will exhaust from the triangular gaps which will simply draw the wasps in. By raising the glass off the ground and as high as possible in relation to the landing platform, then scent from the underside of the hive will draw the wasps to the front of the pane and help confuse them.

Best of luck to all of you who are having problems.

Kind regards,

Karol

 

[sandysman]

Brilliant reply, glad I posted the question.
Andy

 

[RosieMc]

Excellent reply Karol

Thanks - I've kept your information

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

I feel sick: I took a look at the hive at daybreak and out comes a wasp with a bee-head. The pane might as well not be there. I think they're up before the bees and picking off guards. I'll reduce the entrance which will help later in the day but, yuck.

 

[Karol]

I feel sick: I took a look at the hive at daybreak and out comes a wasp with a bee-head. The pane might as well not be there. I think they're up before the bees and picking off guards. I'll reduce the entrance which will help later in the day but, yuck.

Hmmmm!

That suggests that the wasp was hunting, i.e. the nest has not yet matured. If that's the case (which confirms some of the other reports we're getting) then it's going to be a long season and will get worse yet. :0(

 

[Erichalfbee]

Hmmmm!

That suggests that the wasp was hunting, i.e. the nest has not yet matured. If that's the case (which confirms some of the other reports we're getting) then it's going to be a long season and will get worse yet. :0(

That's what I've been seeing here.
I've been looking after a young Kite and wasps have been cutting up his food and the only thing they seem to be after when we eat outside is the protein. The exception is the gang still on the sticky resin coating an old Christmas tree.

 

[Karol]

That's what I've been seeing here.
I've been looking after a young Kite and wasps have been cutting up his food and the only thing they seem to be after when we eat outside is the protein. The exception is the gang still on the sticky resin coating an old Christmas tree.

It's a very confused picture and not at all usual.

It's difficult to decipher the reports we are getting and it would appear that lesser vulgaris wasps (these little diddy ones) have matured early and germanica and vulgaris are lagging behind. What we do know is that hives find it difficult to defend against lesser vulgaris because the wasps are small and pervasive (i.e. as small if not smaller than worker bees).

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

Definitely carnivorous and it's my fault, dropping bees during an inspection. I took the pane off: it was making them sitting ducks. Can't tell if they're wee uns or vulgaris, tbh, but a bit bigger than a worker.

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

Dupe

 

[AdrianSmith]

<snip>

Protecting hives from wasps is not an easy thing to do and requires a detailed understanding of wasp behaviour, trap design and what I call IWM (integrated wasp management) strategies.

I know that a lot of bee keepers are having difficulties at the moment so I will try to help as best I can.

<snip>

I hope this doesn't come accross as too forthright (I am a little tipsy), but for what it's worth, I think I've just made up my own mind on this "Do wasp traps attract wasps to my hive?" question, and I think it's nonsense.
They know about our hives and will exploit them if they can. They know what they're after, and that's what they go for.
Most of the time I watch the wasps flying around at ground level picking up bits and bobs, sometimes going to an entrance and being turned away. Sometimes I see them taking a drone and I think "you're welcome". Sometimes they take a worker and I try and stamp on them.
Yesterday I had a look and there were masses of them robbing honey from a super. The bees weren't there to repel them because I'd got the porter bee escapes in, and the roof had a damaged bee escape. I put a solid board on top while I inspected the roof and it looked like there was a swarm of wasps trying to get into the crack between the board and the super. I had a lovely little pile of dead wasps by the time I'd finished catching them with a childs fishing net and squashing them.
I put a jam+water+washing up liquid wasp trap at the site and took the super away.

Today it was back to normal, minimal wasp activity and only about 10 in the trap.

I saw a similar disregard for a wasp trap about a week ago. I'd used one of those travelling nuc boxes to store some frames and honey had dripped into it. I washed it and left it outside the kitchen to dry. There were soon lots of waps in the area and they were lined up in the nuc with their heads in the corners where the disolved honey must have been washed. I took the nuc away and left a wasp trap, but again it only caught a tiny fraction of the waps in the area.

So, I'm tempted to say "Wasps: Just live with them and ignore wasp-trap salesemen; Be grateful for their contibution to our bees foraging through their pest control; Make sure your colonies are stong enough to look after themselves".

I hope that makes some sort of sense (and to me in the morning ).

 

[Easy Beesy]

Hi karol
I was asked recently 'do wasps inform the hive by doing a type of waggle dance or do the scouts lead the others to a food source?'

Can you enlighten me please?

Thanks

 

[SixFooter]

Advice from our society is to use diy wasps traps and reduce entrances and if it wasnt for this forum, I would not have imagined that this was a bad idea, However, after reading a few posts here last year I tried some ad hoc experiments:

I put lots of wasp traps all over the garden and my observations were:

1) They catch far more wasps in the first couple of days than they do thereafter
2) Traps placed near hives catch more wasps than those placed near stacks of unused beekeeping equipment and those near stacks of beekeeping equipment catch more wasps than those placed at random locations N, S, E and W of the hives.
3) A trap placed indoors by an open door caught absolutely no wasps.
4) A small amount of honey in the same place by an open door attracted a number of wasps

Not altogether scietific, but my conclusions are that wasp traps work and are best placed near the hives.

 

[Erichalfbee]

Not altogether scietific, but my conclusions are that wasp traps work and are best placed near the hives.

Could it be that there are more wasps near the hives rather than anywhere else you sampled as a matter of course?

 

[Karol]

Hi karol
I was asked recently 'do wasps inform the hive by doing a type of waggle dance or do the scouts lead the others to a food source?'

Can you enlighten me please?

Thanks

Both is my understanding depending on the type of food source. Wasps will either pin point navigate (in which case the scout leads the others directly to the source) or terrain navigate (much like bees do).

What's the difference. Well pin point navigation is seen where there is a discrete static food source, e.g. a fallen plum. Terrain navigation is where there is a terrain of mobile food sources, e.g. waving flower blooms in a flower bed or picnic area on a greensward where people never sit in the same exact location.