Wasps already

[madasafish]

I live in an urban setting with fields and woods beside.

There is one LARGE wasp nest within 20 meters of the nearest hive. No problem as yet: all hive entrances reduced in late July . We get more wasp interest when the plums ripen in September.

(at present we have more problems with hungry foxes eating unripe pears off our dwarf pear tree:-( And for the first time ever, woodpeckers on the hives)

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

wasps scouting around the wet supers yesterday and today - It's that time of the year again!

 

[Karol]

That sort of thread only comes from those categories that bemoan the wasps.

Weak colonies, lack of attention to entrances by the beekeeper, or the beek attracting more wasps to the apiary are all prime cause of wasps robbing colonies. Once they start, it is difficult to stop them. Not so many beeks seem to understand that simple statement. Here it is again - 'once they start it is difficult to stop them'. The key is the beekeeper knowing and doing something up-front instead of waiting with their eyes closed and/or brain in neutral.

Hmmmm!

By and large I would agree with the sentiment that there are a few simple integrated wasp management rules that beekeepers need to observe to reduce the risk from wasps. That said, experience comes through learning and berating novices or for that matter more experienced beekeepers isn't very constructive as not all of IWM is intuitive or readily available as a comprehensive info source.

I do demur from two of the points you made.

Strong colonies with optimally managed entrances and with no extraneous wasp attractants are still prone to collapse in the face of persistent and relentless wasp attack. Whilst a strong bee hive will successfully repel wasps during 'normal' years there will be times where conditions will conspire against even the strongest of hives. This year might be one of those exceptional years. The average wasp nest during an average year usually numbers between 2,000 and 5,000 worker wasps and generally these numbers are insufficient to overcome a strong colony of bees. During exceptional years however, where warm and wet summers favour large wasp nest development on the back of an abundance of grazing insects then wasp nests can top well in excess of 20,000 workers. In situations such as this if there is late wasp nest maturation and early die down of ivy then swarm feeding towards late autumn can rapidly explode from nothing to complete calamity within a matter of hours even in the largest and hardiest of bee hives.

It is true that once wasps start then it is comparatively more difficult to stop them but that's not to say it can't be done and with the right knowledge, correct IWM and trapping techniques and a little bit of endeavour then serious wasp attacks can be 'cured' relatively quickly and the damage caused by them 'minimised'.

 

[Elaine]

I know this is slightly off-topic, but we are all familiar with the bees waggle dance - but how do wasps communicate to others the location of food?

 

[Erichalfbee]

I don't know about communication inside the nest but wasps do leave pheromone trails for each other, marking objects with their scent.

 

[Karol]

I know this is slightly off-topic, but we are all familiar with the bees waggle dance - but how do wasps communicate to others the location of food?

Nothing like a simple question!

Wasps are incredibly complex insects that use a plethora of cues to communicate food locations. Sadly only a modest amount of academic research work has been done on this subject and much of what I've seen of the research work has not been optimal simply because experiments have been designed without necessarily taking into account confounding factors that arise from the complexities of wasp behaviour. For example, olfactory cues have been investigated in experiments using conspecific wasps rather than nest specific wasps. In these experiments little heed has been paid to the conflict that arises naturally between conspecific foragers who then emit alarm pheromone which then skews the experimental data on forager recruitment to the food site.

Suffice it to say that wasps communicate food location at the nest through a mixture of dance/vibration (a wag rather than a waggle dance accompanied by wing vibration) and what I loosely term 'limb semaphore' (a repeated flicking motion of the legs). Moreover wasps reinforce this communication by secreting pheromones and olfactory cues.

When it comes to 'marking' food with pheromones I'm not convinced. Personally I believe this behaviour has been confused with the deployment of distress pheromones expressed by wasps when competing/fighting over the same food source with foreign wasps or with the expression of cuticular peptides laid down within feeding devices to mark lines of entry/egress (much like wasp trail marking access to nests in dark attic spaces where the nests are located away from the entry point to the attic).

 

[Dishmop]

I know this is slightly off-topic, but we are all familiar with the bees waggle dance - but how do wasps communicate to others the location of food?

Pherophones

 

[Elaine]

Thanks Karol - I knew it wasn't going to be a simple answer It's just that bees seem to get all the interest and 'sympathy' (and research budgets!) , probably because they are seen to give humans something we want - ie honey/pollination, but wasps don't have the same 'marketing' team - so the general knowledge about them is even less than bees. I must admit to not having searched for an answer on-line before asking here - I took the lazy route, and hoped you may answer

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Up at Carreg Apiary last night - wasps taking a serious interest in the hives - maybe they're finally on the sweet stuff?

 

[Torq]

It's the opposite here. A week ago I was emptying the wasp traps every two days but this week, I've seen hardly any.

 

[Erichalfbee]

The few wasps that my two traps caught were certainly not a herald of the plague experienced last year. I have seen none around the hives and peculiarly none on the Ivy, whereas last year they we on it well before the bees

 

[TOBY-3652]

treated a nest yesterday and it was absolutely jammed full of wasps.. in October so there not finished yet

 

[Fatbee]

Does this mean if nests are still full and the weather turns to how October should be the nests will just collapse but we won't get the scavenging that we normally see end of Aug. wasps will just perish instead?

Karol where are you?!

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

I think that Karol mentioned something that if the season continues as it has, could be a harbinger of plagues of wasps next year

 

[BrianO]

treated a nest yesterday and it was absolutely jammed full of wasps.. in October so there not finished yet

As in exterminated ? A threat ?

Not a chance they would be finished yet, will survive well into November, I monitored a large colony in my garden last year, lasted well into November, need hard extended cold period to kill them off.

 

[TOBY-3652]

As in exterminated ? A threat ?

Not a chance they would be finished yet, will survive well into November, I monitored a large colony in my garden last year, lasted well into November, need hard extended cold period to kill them off.

ho sorry I meant they are no more was at a elderly ladies house. treated as in DEAD

 

[Karol]

Does this mean if nests are still full and the weather turns to how October should be the nests will just collapse but we won't get the scavenging that we normally see end of Aug. wasps will just perish instead?

Karol where are you?!

At your bec and call!

The nests won't collapse. Wasps are hardy insects. The cold doesn't kill them but the lack of food in winter in temperate climates does. The thing that beekeepers need to be wary of with late maturation of wasp nests is that they represent a heightened risk to bee hives right through until as late as the end of January. It is not 'unusual' for wasp nests to mature as late as November although it is reasonably infrequent because it is weather dependant.

The conditions this year so far have been ideal for brewing the ideal autumnal wasp storm. The warm wet summer has had two effects. Firstly it has helped support larger than average wasp nests sustained on the increased number of grazing insects that you find with lush vegetation that you get with warm moist summers. So, once the wasps do start sweet feeding proper there are far more of them.

The second is that wasp nest maturation tends to be delayed in warm wet summer years. The reason this is potentially calamitous for beekeepers is that the nests are likely to mature and therefore convert to sweet feeding just as the ivy stops flowering. If this happens there could be an awful lot of hungry wasps looking for sugar when there aren't that many natural sources available. The nightmare scenario is that this happens just as bees start to cluster for winter when they are less mindful to protect their hive entrance. The result can be an acute and catastrophic wasp assault where even quite healthy hives are overwhelmed. Quite often this can happen without the beekeeper even being aware that a wasp attack has taken place because the assumption is that things have quietened down for the winter and so the hives aren't tended to quite as frequently as they would be earlier in the year. The only symptom is a hive full of dead starved out bees leaving the beekeeper scratching their heads struggling to understand where all the food stores have disappeared to!

 

[Karol]

I think that Karol mentioned something that if the season continues as it has, could be a harbinger of plagues of wasps next year

Nail on the head. Late wasp nest maturation means that queens only have to survive half the time before they start colony founding so more of them survive. It's not quite that cut and dried because a mild wet winter can still cause an abnormally high die off of queens. If however we get a harsh protracted winter then there could be a lot of wasps next year. I don't view that as a bad thing because wasps are really valuable insects especially because they can be easily managed with the right knowledge.

 

[beeno]

Hi Karol,
So far so good on the European Hornet and wasp side the bees have coped well. There is me thinking it is soon all over, so thanks for the heads up. One question please, how many queen wasps does each colony produce for overwintering?

 

[Torq]

About 2 months ago I lost a nuc to wasps and was emptying the wasp traps almost every day there was that many of them about. I put my traps on top of the hives, my logic is that the wasps will find the hives and that if they meet resistance at the entrance then they will go for the easy stuff in the traps above. There were so many about that I was sitting at the kitchen table with the swatter killing them as they flew in the open door.

Then it stopped! I haven't seen any for about 5 weeks but am under no illusions that they won't be back in force. I've bought more wasp traps and will be closing up the entrances very soon. In the past I've seen wasps at the bottle bank in mid December and I think this will be one of those years.

Very soon this forum will be awash with "Help wasps!" threads.

One thought has just occurred to me. Those who have nadired supers, have you just put the sweet stuff closer to the entrance and will this invite the wasps??