Any wasps around at this time of the season are likely to be queen wasps that will go on to potentially raise hundreds of lovely baby wasps that WILL show a definite interest in your hives.
Anyone killing a queen wasp at this time potentially deprives the local ecosystem of perhaps a few thousand wasps. Anyone killing lots of queen wasps potentially deprives the ecosytem of many thousands of wasps. These are wasps that, for the most part, will not take any interest in someones beehives. Instead, wasp catch many thousands of tiny flying insects in their life to feed to their young. The only wasps that show an interest in beehives are the ones at the end of the summer that become free agents after the death of the nest - a smallish proportion of all the wasps produced in the life cycle of a wasp nest.
And who says that any queen wasp killed would have gone on to actually nest in the district in which it was killed.
Only dumb ass, paranoid cretins who do not understand the natural history of wasps would, I think, be fixated with the idea of killing queen wasps at this time of the year. It reminds me a little of the beekeeper in Italy who put poison under his hives to kill a black bear that was showing an interst in his hives, only the bear was one of only a handful remaining in the wild in Italy.
Surely we as beekeepers, who are supposed to understand and value insects, should be the last people who should be on some hair-brained crusade to exterminate wasp queens in spring.
And anyway, it is only the crap beekeepers who get wasp trouble. The ones who in late summer do not close down entrances soon enough, the ones who spill honey or syrup about their apiary, the ones who manipulate at precisely the wrong time, the greedy ones who want to raise a batch of late nucs, etc.
And if someone likes bees, how can they not admire wasps?
