Wasps are a nightmare. You may get lucky and have a paper wasp on your property, they are solitary and make small nests that tend to be non-aggressive unless attacked. You can relocate these wasps at night or easily kill them off with a good spray of insecticide. Wasp traps made of old fruit and apple cider vinegar in clear plastic jugs with a small hole cut in the top do very well to catch wasps, especially if there are only a few. However, if there is a large nest, like a yellowjacket nest or a hornet nest in a tree, then you may be in trouble and if you don’t destroy the nest completely, queen and all, you will be seeing them next year, not just one, but multiple queens.
If you suspect wasp presence anywhere near or on your property, contact Wasp Control Hamilton for quick and safe removal.
A lot of people will assume the wasps will die in the winter, and most of them do. But they also produce new queens and the old queen also survives. They live through the winter by hibernating under a rock or tree bark or in an old log. They survive the winter, most of the time and then wake up on a warm day in spring, it may not be the first but it will likely be in mid-spring when it warms up. If the wasps are caught in a frost, they will die off, a time to celebrate as they saved you a lot of money and a lot of stress. But this is not particularly common as the wasps can tell the temperature very well and wait for the weather to warm up substantially before leaving their hideaway.
The wasps are more than willing to re-enter an old nest and they don’t mind if its damaged, they will fix it when the sterile workers are born and raised. This is much easier for them than starting a new nest and much safer.
The goal in keeping a wasp or hornet nest from coming back is to kill it, remove it, and destroy it and the queen completely. You should do this at night during early summer or very late spring when the nest is still small but handleable and easy to find. Spray it with insecticide, two full cans without stopping, empty them right into the entryway. They will come out and try to fly around but will be dying and will not likely try to sting. You can then take the nest down and destroy it, making sure to search for and kill the queen directly. If you do this before the fall you will not be seeing the wasps return next year, or ever.