Wasp Warning
A couple of months ago the local Gazette warned of potential high numbers of wasps due to a mild winter and last week the National Bee Unit (NBU) issued this warning: ” It is also apparent that Wasps are becoming populous in many areas and they too are desperate for nutrition so Beekeepers should be mindful of the need to protect hives from Wasp invasion particularly where feeding is taking place in the apiary”.
I’ve seen thousands of wasps this year and my first hornets.
Wasp Trap
My Apishield wasp & hornet trap has been in constant use and keeps filling up with hundreds of wasps. At least one of the readers of this blog has spent hours keeping guard to protect their wasps. This trap definitely gives one confidence and I keep seeing wasps going in.
Wasps On Supers
And wasps have been lurking in and around last years supers in my garage, making it quite a hazard to go and retrieve the pram. Last year’s supers just had the stored sugar feed (not honey) so to get them cleaned up I put them in a neighbours back garden whilst they were away on holiday thinking that there was plenty of time for the wasps and bees to clean them up and disappear. They turned up in their thousands and I saw my first European hornets!
They’re huge and quite scary.
Wasps were still lurking in the neighbour’s garden a week later. Not the best of my ideas.
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Had something similar in my garage a few years ago. That got me into trouble with management!
I put a few inches of dilute syrup+ a squirt of washing up liquid in a Miller feeder,put a hive roof on top and put the feeder on a stand making sure that the wasps could access from underneath. The whole surface of the syrup filled with wasps over a couple of days. Most importantly the bees left it totally alone. Need to get it a bit more automated next year so that I can re- use the syrup after filtering out the wasps.
Interestingly just found about 20 dead wasps in my empty jumbo feeder.
As a complete novice or even less, I am wondering why wasps are a problem to bees? Are they predators?