Hi Alla
I agree you don't want a wasp attractant like that near your living hive.
The simplest thing would be to move the dead hive with honey some metres
from the living hive. Allow other creatures, and your bees if they want it,
to rob it out and generally increase the amount of wildlife in the area -
though generally of types you don't want like mice, wasp, wax moth. Sounds
like the honey isn't palatable to humans.
You could remove the comb and just bin it.
To kill the wasps you really need to locate their nest and kill that.
Easier said than done. I haven't found where the wasps raiding my hives are
based. A neighbour showed me one wasp nest in their wall but they were the
small kind of wasp, whereas the ones raiding my hives are the large type.
If you do find their nest, put a bee suit on and spray Raid or puff ant
powder into the entrance. It seems to work. Use gloves you can throw away
as they will get covered in poison. Next day the nests seem to be dead.
The nests can be in various places...:
- In walls eg in air bricks
- Look under the eaves of your roof
- Sometimes they nest in house roofs but enter between tiles
- One species will dig in and nest underground under hedges etc
- They are said to make nests freehanging in trees but I have not seen
that
They could be anywhere. Look up, look down. Ask neighbours if they have
them. I have seen a nest whose entrance was a rotting window frame at waist
height.
Paul
On 6 August 2018 at 12:19, Alla Cordery <alla.cordery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello everyone,
One of my colonies died earlier this summer. I am not sure quite why, but
my guess is that they swarmed and did not leave a queen.
So we left the hive alone even though it had supers full of honey, but
this honey looked very hard and unusable. What we have noticed now is that
lots of wasps go in and out of the hive. Our second hive is only 2 meters
away and is still doing well, but we are very uneasy about the proximity of
wasps.
How do we resolve the problem?
My initial thought was to remove the wasp infested hive ASAP, so it is not
next to our active beehive. Then I thought that we should try to
exterminate the wasps, but I don't know how.
Any advice?
With kind regards,
Alla
