Wasps can be really annoying - especially from August, when your hunger for sweets knows no bounds and they stubbornly buzz around the coffee table. However, you can also spoil them for being a parasite. Especially by simply not offering them anything anymore.
If you want to get rid of wasps, you should not offer them food
Why wasps are so hungry in late summer
Social, i.e. colony-forming wasps are usually the most present and annoying representatives within the large family of wasps. It is they who increasingly come to our garden tables to enjoy our grilled meat and our coffee particles and who also like to build their big nests close to people.
In order to solve the problem of disruptive visits to the dinner table or ice cream shop, it is useful to know something about the way of life of wasps.
Wasps have a life cycle of about six months, which lasts from spring to autumn. The stages that are passed through by the colony-forming species are as follows:
- Creation of a nest and foundation of the state by the queen
- Breeding a large army of working women
- raising sex animals
- mating of sex animals
- State dissolution, wintering of the young queens
In order to ensure the preservation of the species for the next year, the entire state structure, with the breeding of vast numbers of workers, boils down to the rearing of individuals capable of reproduction. When these are added from August, there will be a lot to do for the team of workers, which has grown to around 7000 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.
During a working day, the workers have to fly in and out non-stop to hunt insects. Of course, this also makes them incredibly hungry themselves, so that they forget everything else over a set table with icing particles, rolls with jam or egg salad.
In order not to let them take the butter off their bread in the truest sense of the word, the most effective way is to simply give them as little food as possible and to starve them out of the garden, so to speak. When eating outdoors, this means: Cover all food and sweet drinks consistently so that the enticing scent molecules do not even reach the wasps' noses. You should also regularly pick up fallen fruit from late summer to further reduce the food supply in your area.
Not a good idea: plug the wasp's nest
In order to get rid of a disturbing wasp nest, one could come up with the idea of simply plugging the access holes to prevent the wasps from flying out and finding food. However, this is not only cruelty to animals, but also punishable under species protection law. If the wasp nest is really very annoying and perhaps poses too great a risk because of an existing insect venom allergy, you can obtain permission from the nature conservation authority to remove it and have the nest professionally relocated.