Bas Ansems from Vessem is busy with it: removing wasp nests in the Eindhoven region. Even today he has to work hard, including in a backyard where a nest is causing nuisance. In his eighteen years of pest removal, he has never been so busy with wasps as he is now.
Bass carefully walks around the nest near the terrace. “I can already see it: a nest with about 5000 to 7000 wasps. They are normal wasps and we are going to take them out in a moment.”
He puts on his beekeeper’s suit, takes out a pump and injects a small amount of white powder into the opening of the nest. “It will be a lot quieter here in an hour or two.” The poison should cause the queen to die. Then most of the other nest inhabitants will also die.
This is not the only litter that Bas has to remove today. He can explain why it is so busy now: “It is because of the sunny hours in the spring. Everything was actually perfect for the wasp then.”
“This nest of 5,000 wasps quietly eats about 120,000 insects a day.”
He explains that a nest is very fragile at the beginning of the season in March and April. Such a nest is then very sensitive to frost or moisture and we have hardly had that. “There are also few natural enemies that have disturbed nests this winter.”
Insulating houses doesn’t help either. “If we plug and heat everything from the bottom to the top tile, a queen is much more likely to survive the winter.” In the past, more queens died due to frost, mold or natural enemies. Now they are increasingly finding houses to survive the winter. “That queen continues laughing.”
Bas sometimes hears that people do not remove the nest on purpose because they think it is bad for nature. But that, he says, is a big misunderstanding. “This nest with 5000 wasps quietly eats about 120,000 insects a day. Of course there are also annoying insects among them, but the disadvantage is that wasps sting.”
“You can’t stop getting wasps into your yard or your house.”
Nowadays the internet is full of tips to get rid of wasps, for example with scents or bait boxes. But according to the exterminator, they ultimately do not work and the golden tip does not exist. “You simply cannot prevent wasps from getting into your garden or house. The only option is to seal everything hermetically, but then the question is whether you want to live in your house.”
In the meantime, the first wasps come out of the nest white-colored. “That’s a good sign. They fly away and we’ll never see them again.”
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