Yellow Jacket Control in Your Home

One of the best ways to prevent yellow jackets is to reduce or remove their food sources. Tough to remove all the caterpillars outside, of course, but inside your home, having general pest control done year-round will help take care of their favorite foods. Professional exclusion services will identify and fill cracks and crevices in your foundation as well as identify where siding is coming away from the house and allowing the queen to find her way in and start her new colony. Keeping trash cans clean and covering serving dishes when dining outside can reduce their presence. Also avoid wearing brightly colored clothing and floral perfumes, to which yellow jackets are drawn.

They can indeed. Yellow jackets can be aggressive but are more so in the fall. They won’t merely attack to sting. Yellow jackets will chase you and can and will sting multiple times. Multiple stings from yellow jackets are common because they’re sensitive to disturbance and aggressive in defense of their nests. Sometimes merely coming near a nest, especially if it has been disturbed previously, can provoke an attack.

Like many other flying insects, adult yellow jackets feed on sugary substances such as flower nectar, fruit, and the occasional soda when they find an open can. What makes yellow jackets unique is that they consume protein in their larval stage. Workers bring insects and other types of meat back to the nest as food for the larvae.

You call in a professional. This one is not a job for the DIYer!

Yellow jackets are large flying, stinging pests. Not surprisingly, yellow jackets get their common name from their typical black and yellow color pattern banded across their abdomens. While most species are yellow and black, some can also have white or red markings. Yellow jacket adults have a distinctive segmented body with a thin waist. They are hairless and have elongated wings.

No. They can and will sting you multiple times.

Yellowjackets often make their nests underground in an abandoned gopher hole but are also known to nest in wood piles, dense vegetation, utility vaults, and other enclosed spaces. Look for small stones and dirt piling up around the opening of a burrow/hole. These are signs of an underground yellow jacket nest. So, that nest you’re seeing in your tree – it’s not yellow jackets.