Dealing With Wasps In The Spring

Now that spring has arrived, it’s important for homeowners to begin focusing on pest control once again. With the ice melting away, the weather beginning to warm up, and a lot more moisture and dampness coming into the air and the earth, the bugs and other pests are also starting to wake up and will soon be back to cause nuisances to property owners everywhere.

One of the big questions homeowners often have is what they should do with existing wasp nests they have on their property. The good news is that after the winter, there will not be any more wasps alive in those nests that you need to worry about.

What happens with wasps is that, late in the summer, new queens are produced and then mate. After mating, they leave the nest and fly to other sites that offer more shelter, where they can spend the winter. Back in the wasp nest, the workers and old queen continue with their everyday routines until they die from the freezing winter weather. These new queens that have mated with other wasps will not return to these wasp nests but will instead go on to build their own new nests at the beginning of the spring, at which point the process repeats itself.

Handling Wasp Nests At Your House

If you have nests around your home that are still up from where they were built last summer or spring, there really isn’t a huge hurry to get rid of them. Wasps likely will not come back to reuse a nest that is, say, hanging from a tree branch or an overhang of your house. You can call for pest removal in Rochester, NH, to get rid of them if you want, but it is not a pressing need.

However, if you see wasps flying back and forth from an opening in the structure of your home or garage, this is a problem you need to address immediately. While the old nest will not be reused, the wasps could still very well decide to build a new nest inside that same opening, which will be problematic as you will not be able to see it. If you believe this is happening at your home, you should seal up any openings you come across. Early spring is the best time to seal those openings because you can take care of the issue before the wasp queens become active again and work on building brand-new nests.

There are also cases in which wasps can start getting active on particularly mild late winter days. In these cases, the wasps will seek warmth, which generally leads to them trying to get inside your home. Just because they get into your home does not mean they’ve built a nest in there—in general, the best way to proceed is to simply swat them or to let them fly out a window or door.

For more tips about how to handle wasps in springtime, contact Dependable Pest Solutions to learn about home pest removal in Rochester, NH.