Manchester & Trafford Pest Control

Posts Tagged ‘bees’

We destroy wasps’ nests at a fixed fee of £29.50 (except postocdes L, CW & CH £39.50) 7 days per week

Free Phone 0800 019 8382

Pest Control Wasp or Bee?

Pest Control Wasp or Bee? – as a pest controller covering Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire it has become apparent that there is a great deal of confusion, especially in the under forties between wasps and bees and even between honeybees and bumblebees.

Perhaps in these heath and safety obsessed days schools no longer have the summertime nature rambles of my youth and that is a great pity.

At a distance it is possible to the untrained eye to confuse wasps and honeybees but bumblebees should never be in doubt.

This One's A Wasp

A wasp is any insect of the order Hymenoptera and suborder Apocrita that is neither a bee nor ant but in terms of common understanding we are dealing in North West Britain with just three species which we term wasps, The Common Wasp (Vespula vulgaris), The German Wasp (Vespula germanica) and the relative newcomer termed the ‘Euro Wasp’ (Dolichovespula media).

The biology of wasps and bees is very different.

In the late autumn a wasps’ nest dies out completely and is never re-used. The workers and males die but the newly produced queens hibernate for the winter before waking in the spring to start nest building.

At the first sign of warmer weather the young queens emerge from hibernation and commence nest building, mixing rotten wood with saliva to make ‘wasp paper’ with which to construct the nest.

She will lay 15 – 20 eggs in cells inside the nest and tend these until the first workers emerge to take over the nest building process.