The same wasp problem

My friends and I all have wasps in the summer.

One friend has a pool to handle Midwestern summers. The trouble is that wasps like the pool, too. Every year he spends hundreds of dollars on traps, mothballs and scents. It works but he doesn’t always have the time to keep up with it. One evening he was swimming and a bat brushed right by his ear, eating wasps. He realized that having a bat close by could deter the wasps from his pool. The bat house he bought plus some traps eliminated the problem entirely.

My other friend doesn’t live near water. He has a porch that attracts wasps because the wood isn’t finished. Wasps love to burrow in it. Last spring he strapped unscented glue traps every few feet around the porch. The traps killed 50 wasps this year. He keeps dead bodies on the traps to deter their wasp buddies. No scent, only visuals attract them. Wasps still come around but not enough to bother him.

My neighborhood lake attracts wasps and all the other bugs. Muggy east coast summers make it impossible to have a clean porch everyday. There are wasps, mosquitos, and gnats which attract spiders so there’s plenty to keep up with. The spiders eat bugs but they overwhelm the porch. I invested in scent packs, candles and sprays. It works all together but you need to be out there every day or two, otherwise all the flying bugs come back and so do the spiders. One day, I realized my neighbor doesn’t have my problem. They aren’t outside as often as I am, but they have bird feeders. I invested in a few and the wasps disappeared. And most of the other bugs either left or were eaten. Now I only clean up the porch once per week instead of daily.

We all had a wasp problem and used slightly different techniques to deal with them. Often times, there are many ways to the right answer.