Has anyone tested the bee suits with bald face/white faced hornets, the ones that build those big conical grey enlarging as the season progresses paper nests. We were kind of joking in chat this evening about putting a suit on and ripping in to hornets nest for an authentic test of hornet...
A few Bald-faced, Yellow Jackets and European hornets do little harm to healthy colonies. They can smell distress, though, so if a colony is dying…sick and/or Queenless…they’ll be there in a heartbeat. Now Yellow-Legged and Giant Asian Hornets are a whole different kettle of fish altogether.
We have more European hornets this year than I ever remember seeing before. Not sure how much of an impact they have on my bee population but I'm getting tired of seeing them hanging around my hives and flying away with bees. Has anyone tried making a trap like the one in the video below...
Kill the hornets by placing the entire bag in a freezer overnight. Will I get stung from hornets that emerge from a collected nest? There will be few, if any hornets in a nest collected in late fall. If you feel the need to be extra-cautious, leave the nest in a garage or porch where it will be protected from the weather until mid-winter.
The hornets/wasps goal is to gain access to the soft nutritious brood. A few dead bees is no big deal, if you have raiding parties then you may want to do something to slow them.
I've killed many hundreds of wasps and hornets and not a single honeybee. Slow Drone: I have installed robbing screens and they help a little for awhile, but the yellow jackets are so persistent that they also learn to go around the sides eventually.