Wasps can be really annoying - especially from August onwards, when their hunger for sweets knows no bounds and they stubbornly buzz around us at the coffee table. However, you can also spoil the parasites for them. Especially by simply not offering them anything anymore.
How can you starve wasps effectively?
To successfully starve wasps, you should consistently cover food and sweet drinks to make their tempting scent molecules unreachable. In addition, it is advisable to regularly collect fallen fruit from late summer onwards and thus reduce the food supply nearby.
Why wasps are so hungry in late summer
Social wasps, i.e. community-forming wasps, are usually the most present and annoying representatives within the large family of wasps. They are the ones who increasingly come to our garden tables to feast on our grilled meat and our coffee and who also like to build their big nests close to people.
In order to solve the problem of annoying visits at the dinner table or in the ice cream parlor, it makes sense to know something about the way of life of wasps. Wasps have an approximately six-month life cycle, which runs from spring to… lasts until autumn. The stages that the state-forming species go through are as follows:
- Creation of a nest and founding of the state by the queen
- Raising a large army of workers
- Raising sexual animals
- Mating of sexual animals
- Dissolution of the state, overwintering of the young queens
In order to ensure the preservation of the species for the next year, the entire state building process with the breeding of huge numbers of workers amounts to the breeding of reproductively capable individuals. When they join from August onwards, there will be a lot to do for the team of workers, which has grown to around 7,000 animals. Because the brood to be cared for has now grown to its highest number and is also particularly important - after all, it is now about the new young queens and the drones, which are responsible for the important task of reproduction.
On a working day, the workers have to fly in and out constantly to hunt insects. Of course, this makes them incredibly hungry themselves, so that they forget everything else when they have a table set with icing, jam rolls or egg salad.
In order not to let them literally take the butter off your bread, the most effective way is to simply provide them with as little food as possible and, so to speak, starve them out of the garden. When eating outdoors, this means consistently covering all food and sweet drinks so that the tempting scent molecules don't even reach the wasps' noses. From late summer onwards, you should also regularly pick up fallen fruit to further reduce the food supply in your area.
Not a good idea: stuffing a wasp's nest
To get rid of a disturbing wasp nest, you could come up with the idea of simply blocking the access holes to prevent the wasps from flying out and getting food. However, this is not only animal cruelty, but also punishable under species protection law. If the wasp nest is really disturbing and perhaps poses a great danger due to an existing allergy to insect venom, you can obtain permission from the nature conservation authority to remove it and have the nest relocated professionally.
