Worldwide Beekeeping
Beekeeping => Pests and Diseases => Topic started by: Alleyyooper on October 01, 2015, 11:20:22 am
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This time of year it is tough to do any thing with honey bees because of the Yellow Jackets and to some extent the Bald Faced hornets.
I make traps that set on top of the hives and beside them starting late July.
Kare drinks OJ like crazy as does her mother so I get those plactic clear bottles by the card board box full setting around waiting on me.
I drill a 3/8 inch hole a couple inches down from the cap that I can reach with my index finger from the inside. Fill the jar with a little sugar, water and some dish soap a couple inches deep about a 1:1 ratio water soap and shake it up good. Then with the cap off I smear the inside around that 3/8 inch hole with jelly and or jam( like to get those packets from a resturant) and close the jar up. Takes about 5 minutes for the Jackets to find them. even when the jelly/jam is gone the sugar water draws them Many times I will return in a couple days the jar will be packed full.
I found a way to locate their nest by accident one day when applying powdered suger to the bees in my early days for mite control. You sure can see those ALL WHITE yellow jackets a long way off and I normaly will find the nest with in 100 feet of the bee hives. A good dose of Spectraside Pro puts the fix on the whole nest for good.
;D Al
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Sounds great! How about a few pictures?
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Pictures of what? A jug with an orange cap with a hole in it?
;D Al
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Yep----and perhaps a few wasps inside to aid in displaying the effectiveness of your ingenuity. Not for showing off but for showing how. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
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Here is a link select a video watch and go to work.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEViuubg5W6oIAUQUPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=Yellow+Jacket+Bottle+Trap&fr=sfp&hspart=w3i&hsimp=yhs-syctransfer
;D Al
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I do pretty much the same thing with a 2 liter soda bottle and three holes up by the neck, thread a wire thru the cap, knot both sides of the wire so it can be hung on a branch and extend the wire down into the bottle and hang a piece of hot dog over the syrup. I think the hot dog deters the bees as I don't have any problems with them getting into it. This year I experimented with Faygo soda, seemed they liked to drown in the redpop best! :D.
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Have a few wasps this year, but not like it was last year, this year the insect council decided there would be a pandemic of SPIDERS instead of wasps...
Our house is NEW, the weather stripping is good, but somehow I find six or seven spiders running about inside the house every night.. Not little spiders either, they are Wolf Spiders the size of a silver dollar;
(https://worldwidebeekeeping.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fs28.postimg.cc%2Fvmh7811xl%2Fwolf_spider_lrg.jpg&hash=8181013aee5e8d91df320e66ffd6a3e6f2ee75fd) (http://postimg.cc/image/vmh7811xl/)
Need a wolf spider trap!
I am still waiting on the insect council to declare a honey bee pandemic............
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Lazy,
My wife absolutely refuses to kill wolf spiders. She'll sweep them aside. She's convinced they are beneficial and kill many pests such as brown recluse. As for me, they creep me out but it's her house. :)
Neill
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That danged thing isn't an insect. It's an arachnid. :) I'm not a big fan of spiders, but I do let the big cotton spiders build nests around the exterior of my home. We have lots of them and wolf spiders.
We don't have many yellow jackets, thank God for that. My bees have not been bothered by pests, other than me this year.
We have lots of pecan threes in our area, and therefore, don't bother the wax wing wasps as they kill lots of web worms to feed their young. Web worms can be a serious problem to pecan trees. Some of our pecan orchards are hundreds of acres in size.
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"My wife absolutely refuses to kill wolf spiders. She'll sweep them aside. She's convinced are beneficial and kill many pests such as brown recluse.
As for me, they creep me out but it's her house. :)"
neill, sorry couldn't help it but dang, thats funny!
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We bought another home this summer, and it sits in the middle of sixty some odd acres. No one has lived on the place for two and one-half years, and the pastures have not been sprayed with pesticides, nor has the house and barns. I am amazed at the abundance of wasps, spiders, toad frogs, and such. The pastures have a good stand of improved bermuda grass that I believe is a Tifton grass. Several of my neighbors want to lease the grass pastures for hay, but I have been telling them there would be no pesticides sprayed on the grass. Most hay farmers want to rid the world of grass hoppers. If no one wants to do it my way, I will suck it up and do it myself.
This is the only place west of Fort Worth where I have ever seen yellow jackets. I had a soft drink spill on my patio table, and when I went to clean it up there were four yellow jackets lapping up the coke. I like living where there is more nature, and the yellow jackets are just another necessary evil.
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Lazy
I couldn't agree more!
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AMEN BROTHER. I love having the deer in the front & side yard, the turkeys also. I can do with out the possums coons and skunks but are like yellow jackets and can be dealt with.
;D Al
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Right now I'm suffering from an invasive species of wild parrot that has set up home in Israel. They are working to pick my pecan tree of all its' nuts--before they ripen. They can't and don't even eat them, they just chump them at the stems and they fall from the tree. My grass is filled with useless pecans.
Needless to say, I don't appreciate them.
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Do they frighten easily? One thick that works with the starling and cherry trees is kill one and hang it in the tree It keep the rest away. My cousin caught one and put it in a cage, he noticed that every time the dog went by the cage the bird would give out an alarm squawk and the other birds would stay away so he took up rattling the cage.
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" kill one and hang it in the tree" I've tried that "trick" a few times---it didn't keep them away. Do they frighten easily--if they see someone coming after them, they definitely fly away quickly, but they come back as soon as you don't chase them. I use an air rifle to try and "eliminate" them, but they are amazingly well camouflaged in the pecan trees. Their color blends in with the leaves and the shape of the leaves matches the flow of their feathers. In former years, when they realized the connection between the air rifle and their getting shot at, they would fly off when I would appear, so I had to camooflage myself. But, who has the time to look for them all day long. There are dozens of them and just one of me.
I don't feel quilty about shooting them since they are an invasive species that has upset the balance of all sorts of other birds in our area. Apparently, they were first brought here as "house pets" and either escaped or were released. They seem to be intelligent birds and manage to fend for themselves quite well.
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Net the tree? Pecan trees are quite tall if I remember, or do you prune them back when their in an orchard?
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Ef, I started a new thread titled Birds. Check it out.
http://www.worldwidebeekeeping.com/forum/index.php/topic,4696.0.html
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Apis, you remember quite correctly---I have two pecan trees (of two different varieties, Shlay and Burket) and they are both way too big for netting---I estimate them to be about 15-20 meters high. They are also quite wide. If you look in the picture of "where Efmesch lives" and bring it to the maximum magnification, you can use your imagination to help you see how they cover my house. This past winter I had to do a lot of work to trim them so that they wouldn't completely shade my hot water solar panels and keep me from getting sun-heated water for our house. Even after trimming, they are enormous.
Iddee, Thanks for the new thread---Now I have to figure how to get the traps into the trees and bait them to entice the parrots to enter.
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How does it go 20 black birds baked in a pie. How about 20 parrots rosting over coals. Think squab.
;D Al