They’re baaaack! It’s yellow jacket season in Edmonds

It’s that time of year again. You set up your picnic table and within minutes you’re visited by one to several of these uninvited guests buzzing around your food dishes, sitting on your meal, and flying off with small bits of whatever they can grab, only to return in a few minutes for more.

Yes, our yellow jackets are back, and this year’s warm spring means the nests are bigger and more numerous.

Frequently misidentified as bees, yellow jackets are actually a species of wasp. They are social hunters living in nests containing workers, queens, and males (drones). Nests are found in protected places such as hollow logs, in stumps, under bark, in leaf litter, in soil cavities, and around your home anywhere they can find a gap big enough to squeeze through.

Nests are established in early spring by overwintering queens fertilized the previous season. They select the site, build a small paper nest, and lay from 30 to 50 eggs. The eggs hatch into larvae, which the queen feeds and nurtures until they grow large enough to pupate and metamorphose into adult workers. By midsummer, these workers take over the jobs of foraging for food, caring for the queen and larvae, and defending the colony, a job they do with particular ferocity as anyone who mistakenly disturbs a nest will attest.

The queen remains in the nest, now focused entirely on egg-laying, and the colony begins to expand exponentially. To feed the growing numbers of young, the workers are constantly foraging for food and are uncanny in their ability to sniff out anything from unattended garbage to your afternoon barbeque.

This constant activity means you’ll start to see them hovering around their nest openings, often on a protected corner of your home or a spot in your garden.

Even if you don’t see a nest, a walk through Home Depot is all you’ll need to know that it’s yellow jacket time in Edmonds. Multiple displays of wasp and hornet killer dot the aisles, and according to one Home Depot worker “they’re flying off the shelves.”

If left alone, the nest will grow to 5,000 or more workers by late summer. When the cold weather returns, the nest will die off naturally, but if you choose to eliminate the nest rather than wait for fall, it’s easier to do this now while it’s still small.

Another consideration is that while they are aggressive by nature, yellow jackets become even more so in late summer as the nights get cooler and food becomes more scarce. At these times just walking past the nest is often enough to get you stung. Stings, while uncomfortable, are not a severe threat to most individuals, but can be dangerous or even life-threatening to people who are allergic or are stung many times.

While there are many effective do-it-yourself wasp and hornet killer products available, using them always carries the danger of being stung. So if you are allergic to insect stings or just don’t want to take that risk, it’s best to call a professional exterminator.

— By Larry Vogel