Oh come on. This thread…I’m not going to bother trying to sleep tonight.
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It’s the only way to be sure
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This is what my husband (who keeps bees) often does when he is begged by desperate people to deal with wasps, hornets, etc. (All the usual disclaimers apply here: YMMV, always have a buddy when wading into a job this big, be careful, don’t do this if you are violently allergic to Hymenoptera venom, etc.)
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Suit up. A beekeeping suit is great if you are not spraying commercial pesticides. Please don’t handle bees after you have handled a can of Raid in the same beesuit. Several layers of clothing (heavy sweapants/sweatshirt) or leather or rubberized or thick plasticized rain gear can work. Note the guy in the video is basically wearing rubber dishwashing gloves. Wear the best heavy boots you can get your hands on, tuck and tape your pants’ hems into the boots. Same goes with the gloves. You must wear a hat-and-veil. Must. Zero skin should be showing at the end of your suiting up.
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Do this in the coldest part of the year because these bastards are the most sluggish then and will have the hardest time rebuilding.
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Do this at night when all the hornets, yellowjackets, etc. are “home” for a full census and most complete eradication.
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Use a headlamp that has a red light setting. The bugs have a harder time seeing “red.”
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You can smoke them out if you have the time. This is pretty nontoxic compared with actual pesticides. Greenwood fires with burlap, cardboard, etc. For massive nests, a big long smokeout, then smash up the nest completely, then more smoking.
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You can use liquid ammonia, a household cleaner. People use this on floors. Load up a supersoaker or a pump sprayer and spray into punched in holes down into the whole nest. A pitchfork or sledge or broomhandle can all make holes. You may use tens of gallons on a nest the size of that one in the video. Ammonia basically turns into nitrogen, so it can ultimately be fertilizer (it burns all it touches for a while, so yeah it’ll kill grass and stuff initially). The insects die on contact, and they can’t breathe through ammonia. If you are using ammonia, wear a NIOSH-rated-for-solvents 2-barrel breather filter.
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You can also use orange oil in place of ammonia. We use CitraSolv. Same cautions apply, as above, for ammonia.
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Be aware that there’s a “danger! intruder!” wasp pheromone that lasts 3 long days if you, your clothing, your gear etc. get stung. For those 3 days, you are basically radioactive when it comes to wasps–you are a target they will selectively chase (and for quite a distance). All wasps. Anywhere. Wash the hell outta all your clothing or at least bag it and leave it alone 3 days.
ETA: my husband says wasps’ stingers aren’t all that much longer than bees’, but that they can sting over and over again because wasps have retractable stingers. Honeybees sting once and die. He favors a decent beesuit with zipped attached veil: a really solidly attached veil is key.
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You don’t want to contaminate another dead hive with the last one.
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Yay skunks!
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Of course, honeybees can kill hornets, too.
WE. ARE. SPARTA!
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Does anyone remember how panicked we were about the migration of the Africanized honeybee, a.k.a. Killer Bees in the 1970s? Good times.
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Made for good B movie fodder though…
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Made famous by SNL
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Africanized bees are just as terrifying as wasps. They’re intensely territorial and aggressive and will chase people quite a distance before giving up. I’ve personally known a few people that were attacked by a hive, coincidentally both of them while hiking now that i think about it.
Wasps i think one has more of a chance to run into than bees since there’s so many varieties of them. Regardless i want nothing to do with either one. Nope.
Totally gave me nightmares as a kid.
Yes!
Saw it on TV, some weekend afternoon. Like the little girl with the lolly pop dead on the play ground. I am like, who gets to eat candy at school?
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Nothing is quite as over the top as the Arachnophobia movie though 
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Well that had Dan Goodman in it, so yeah, no comparison.
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There are the videos of people doing the unhealthy practice of melting down cans and pouring the aluminum into ant hills. I wonder if anyone has done that with a wasp ground nest?
Molten metal, stinging insects, what could go wrong?
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It is still a paper nest under the ground and the aluminum would burn through all that so probably not all that interesting. The last nest I had to deal with was right next to a tree stump so they managed to have several exits and they dug out a new hole after the first bit of spray. I tried to drown them with a hose and that just collapsed about half of the nest into a tiny sink hole. Boiling water at night finally did them in.
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If it’s an underground nest i would imagine that the aluminum would burn the hive but still retain the overall shape of the dug out tunnels, so in theory it should work. But i’m not going to go around messing with molten metals and angry wasps.
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seeing all the queens was pretty cool. i don’t care for how aggressive wasps/hornets/yellow jackets are but i am always in awe of their biological machinery. if they weren’t little flying shitheads i’d have some sympathy.
one time i was hiking in the great lakes area in tall grass wearing shorts and “discovered” a black hornet nest. when those things decide they don’t like you they will f*ckin seek you out like little heat seeking drones. glad i’m not allergic, even so i got stung so much i was pretty affected.
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