Yellowjackets swarm around Middletown, NJ home

My schedule today brought me to a home in Middletown, NJ to help a homeowner who had noticed a constant flow of wasps entering a small hole in the siding of a home. Before i arrived, I had a good idea of what I would be dealing with — yellowjackets. Yellowjackets, with their yellow stripes on their abdomen, are one of the most easily recognizable insectsUnlike paper wasps and baldfaced hornets, these wasps like to build their nests in hidden cavities. Often, they’ll build a nest in a hole in the ground, an old rodent burrow, or anywhere the soil is loose enough to make a hole. Other times, like here, the wasps will find a cavity in or around a home like a gap in a home’s siding. These spaces serve as an open invitation for a yellowjacket queen to start building a nest. Yellowjackets are social wasps meaning that like many insects they live in colonies with a queen-worker caste system where everyone has specialized functions and they work together for the common good (maybe people have something to learn from them!). 

I walked right up to the nest entrance where I could safely apply the residual dust right into the nest cavity. The dust flows into the cavity, coats the walls, and covers the nest. Not only are the wasps in the nest are killed. The returning foraging wasps returning to the nest also come into contact with the dust. Before you know it, the entire nest is wiped out. 

I explained to the homeowner that the product takes a few hours to work and that young, curious children should be kept away from the treated area for about six hours. 

The homeowner thanked me for our quick response. Whenever Cowleys gets a call for any stinging insect infestation, we make every effort to get a technician out there as soon as possible. A yellowjacket attack can easily turn into a serious medical emergency, and it is something to avoid. If we can treat a yellowjacket infestation before anyone suffers from a sting, it’s a good day for us!