How to Get Rid of Wasps and Keep Them From Coming Back
Every summer we arrive at the summer house and I do a tour before anything else gets unpacked.
Not the excited kind. The cautious kind, where you walk around the perimeter of the house looking at corners and eaves and the gap around the air conditioning unit with a specific kind of dread that comes from experience. Because every year without fail the wasps have been busy while we were gone.
They find the sheltered spots. The corners nobody checks in winter. The space behind the air conditioning housing where it meets the wall. By June there’s always something somewhere and the question is just how many and how big.
Last summer it was three nests. One under the roof overhang near the front door, one in the corner of the backyard wall, and one that took me a while to find because it was tucked behind the external unit of the air conditioning where I couldn’t see it without getting uncomfortably close. That one I didn’t deal with myself.
And then of course there are the meals outside. Which is the whole point of having a summer house — eating in the backyard in the evening, taking your time over food, that particular kind of unhurried summer meal that doesn’t happen in the city. Except the wasps come to those too. They circle the food, land on the rim of glasses, make everyone tense in a way that is so specific and so annoying and so hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. You’re not scared exactly. You’re just never quite relaxed.
Several summers of dealing with this and I’ve worked out what actually helps. Some of it is obvious. Some of it surprised me.