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Comment by samcheng | Hacker News Reader

I've never had to deal with a murder hornet infestation, but I can approve of their 'vacuum' method for clearing yellowjacket nests in high-traffic areas.

Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of separate sessions to mop up any stragglers.

No fancy beekeeper suit necessary, and, best of all, no need to spread nasty poisons.

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> No fancy beekeeper suit necessary

Does that perhaps depend on the species of wasp, or maybe the reach of the wand?

IIRC, there was one youtube video where the little bastards went straight for the dude's face during shop-vac'ing. He could smell the venom they were trying to spray in his eyes.

When one of the wasps (or hornets?) went straight for his GoPro sensor, its face filled my large monitor and I nearly had a heart attack.

Please share the link to that video if you can somehow recall it! Sounds better than most of the junk I've been watching on Netflix lately.

There are a number of people on youtube with these sorts of videos. Hornet King is a favorite channel of mine to watch that also has good information.

Be sure to put a mask on your vacuum nozzle. And wear a mask without obvious eyes.

Works for everyone I know who has tried it.

I'm no expert, but I've read a bit about Vespula vulgaris (the most common sort of wasp in the UK) and tackled a few nests in the past.

My impression is that if you put a vacuum cleaner next to the entrance you may, if you're lucky, catch nearly all the wasps that leave the nest, but the queen never leaves the nest, and the eggs and larvae don't leave the nest, and I think there may also be some workers that stay in the nest looking after the larvae, so things will be quieter after you've finished vacuuming, but the colony will probably regenerate itself in a week or so.

Won't you want to destroy the nest once the vacuuming is done?

Might be tricky if the nest is in a garage or something (and not easy to cut down and move), but otherwise that could probably be solved by burning it.

Isn't that when you finish it off by pouring 10 pounds of molten aluminum down the hole?

That's why you use dust or pyrethrin spray as well, and seal them in afterwards. Hot burning wasp death!

Vespex is used here in New Zealand and has been a game changer. Wasps are the greatest pest in New Zealand if you measure pests in “kgs per hectare”.

With Vespex you don’t go looking for nests, you let the colony poison itself.

Because it is protein based and not sugar based, it’s not attractive to as many species. The downside is that the wasps only take it at a specific time of year - when they are consuming protein.

https://www.merchento.com/vespex.html

For those wondering about the soapy water, it effectively suffocates the hornets because soap allows the water to penetrate and clog the spiracles which prevents them from breathing.

Soapy water is actually a powerful insecticide against many arthropods:

https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/insects/insect-c...

It does seem to work on insects resilient to other poisons for sure.

We used a mix of vinegar, soap, and water in a spray bottle to rid our patio of earwigs this year and it seemed to work incredibly well. The insecticides we were spraying them with before trying the soap did absolutely nothing but cost $7 a can.

I have a mid-grade phobia of stinging insects and arachnids.

I once blew a few hours to anxiously watching youtube videos of people destroying nasty wasp/hornet infestations. (I'm still not sure why. Probably some mix of morbid fascination and aggression fantasy.)

The soapy-water-shopvac trick appeared in a lot of those videos. (Less commonly: thermite, or quad-propeller drones.)

Same w/ "bees," but not arachnids. Also blew a few hours watching nest extermination videos. I generally wish the best (within reason) for our non-human beings, but it was very cathartic.

The method is fine but I'd probably still wear a suit while setting such a thing up ... at least a jacket, gloves, full pants tucked into thick socks, and mosquito net.

Same. I can tell you from visceral experience that a tractor at 12mph doesn't outrun pissed off yellow jackets XD (are they ever not pissed off?)

>No fancy beekeeper suit necessary

What? have you seen size of that hornet? I am wearing space-suite if available.

There is a guy in Japan who uses a vacuum on these wasps. I think you want to use the suit with these guys:

https://youtu.be/1WkS5fyXDqU

> No fancy beekeeper suit necessary

Professionals wear PPE because if you incur a low-probability risk every time you do X, and you do X often enough (because it's your profession), X will happen to you.

For example, if you have a 99% chance of nothing going wrong, and you do that thing 500 times, it's essentially guaranteed to happen (0.99^500 = 0.0066).

The stinging insect removal guys will be stung if they are in the profession for decades without PPE.

In my experience, just vacuuming up yellowjackets in a shop vac kills them. No soapy water needed.

I don't understand how that kills them. Blunt trauma?

Seems like you'd just have a huge pile of mostly-alive wasps in your shop-vac.

Most insects are very prone to dying of dehydration if their exoskeleton is pierced - it's how diatomaceous earth works. My best guess with how vacuums kill insects is small nicks to the exoskeleton from flying debris causing eventual death. I've never vacuumed up an insect or spider and seen it come out alive.

I read that they can’t see well in the dark, so I deal with them at night. It’s a bit unnerving hearing them fly around when you can’t see them, but I’ve never been stung :)

I don't remember exactly, but on YouTube there's a guy who posts videos of him vacuuming yellow jackets and nest extraction.

Propane weed torch is another good non-chemical solution that might be appealing to some depending on nest location.

Do you realize you can kill someone with this comment, that beekeeper suit is optional?

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