[Market-farming] yellow jackets

sora at coldreams.com sora at coldreams.com
Tue Sep 4 19:16:05 EDT 2007


>
> The last two years, we've been chased out or our raspberry bushes by
> hordes (and I mean hordes!) of yellow jackets.  Ordinarily, we can pick
> for 6+ weeks, but this year we were only able to pick for about 2 weeks
> before the bushes became too treacherous.
>
> My husband has hunted high and low for nests with no success.  We have
> many traps set, both the pheremone-type and large buckets of soapy water
> baited with apples.  The traps work, in that they've successfully
> caught  hundreds of yellow jackets, but still they come . . .
>
> Does any one know a strategy for keeping yellow jackets out of the berry
> bushes?
>
> Eliza Fletcher
> Moscow, ID
>
I know those hordes...all too personally!  I'm up by the Canadian border,
Idaho and raspberries are my main cash crop.  And yes the traps are the
way... here they do ground nests...I found that out by stepping on a nest
in my compost heap...got stung 17 times.....started doing research at that
time.  This is my understanding and strategy.....The old timers here call
them meat bees.  What this refers to is that in the early spring the
queens hatch and they are heavily drawn to meat, fish.  If the traps are
set very early in the spring, you catch the queens.  According to my
reading, for every queen you catch, you eliminate 10,000 worker bees.  The
workers are looking for sweets, eg your apple traps.  When my raspberries
are on, you can smell them a mile away.  The meat must be changed often
because they are not attracted to the rancid.  So I go with the
pheremones, but early, early.
Last year it worked great...no yellowjackets at all...huge crop.
This year, being an extremely dry year, was terrible for everyone, mine
stayed in check up until the last few weeks of picking and I lost about
20-30 lbs, could have been much worse.




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