Wasp Blower

Summary

A colony of Yellowjacket wasps moved into a gap somewhere inside our front door, which we noticed only after they set up a heavy traffic pattern over the front step. The nest is far enough up inside the door frame (or, shudder, the wall) to be immune to rattlecan insecticide spray and the wasps simply tiptoe across sticky-trap sheets laid on their entrance paths. Taking a hint from the comments to our long-ago fruit fly adventure, I conjured a Wasp Blower from available materials: Wasp Blower – installed That’s a hulking 12 V electronics case fan mounted on a cardboard bulkhead inside what’s basically a tunnel, with its power supply plugged into a widowmaker extension cord screwed into the light fixture next to the door. The fan blows away from the door, with the general idea of killing wasps leaving the nest. Arriving wasps can walk home around the box, but departing wasps always take flight from the small crack under the door sill, whereupon they’re sucked into the fan, shattered by the blades, and blown out onto the step. A Yellowjacket can make headway into a 1 m/s wind, but not for very long, which explains why most of them prefer walking home. The carnage looks awful, so it seems to be working …