DIY Wasp Spray

[GRUMPA]

I kinda figured this would be the best place for this.

Most folks know I live remote, very remote. Water around here is very scarce in any form, folks here have wells. Every year the Mud Daubers have been getting worse, and that can of wasp spray isn't getting any cheaper.

I've taken down the nests over the years only to have them rebuilt in no time. Every time we water here out they come in full force and gather mud at an alarming rate.

I got this recipe off of YouTube and decided I only had a few bucks to lose if it didn't work.

16oz empty spray bottle (Must have a stream nozzle and NOT the spray nozzle.) Almost full of water of course
1\4-1\2 cup of Dawn soap.
20 drops of Peppermint Oil (@ WallyWorld $6 for .5 oz)

When you give them a good hit with the stream from the spray bottle the results are almost instant. Had a few hornets come in and I got the same results, and so far flies aren't immune either.

It doesn't work like the poisonous sprays, but takes a few seconds for the spray to take effect so be patient. Sprayed any nest I could find since the spray gets rid of what is inside as well.

Here I was making rice loads for the 357mag and getting them that way. Those Mud Daubers seemed to be armor plated at times, but this stuff really does the job and it isn't toxic like the canned spray. I made almost 200 rounds of those rice loads, which take a while to do, and this home brewed spray is rather cheap and effective.

A person needs to enjoy the smell of peppermint, just a single spray and it gets fragrant real quick.

[XDROB]

Love this idea. I get Wasps holding nest under the shutters and sometimes get into house. Never did like spraying the commercial stuff indoors.

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[richhodg66]

I like non-poisonous solutions like this. At our other house, we had the box elder maple bugs real bad. I don't think they're real harmful, but annoying. Turns out a spray bottle of water with a little dish soap added kills them very quickly and I don't have to worry about what some chemical is doing to the eco system.

Those mud daubers are real bad here some years, I'll have to remember this.

[Hickok]

Neat! We get those mud daubers too. I will make some.

In a pinch, a can of starting fluid will down any flying insect. One squirt and they go down.:mrgreen:

[Hardcast416taylor]

In the news. A homeowner in Detroit decided to get rid of a hornets nest in the eaves of his garage with a fireworks smoke bomb. Got rid of the hornets and his garage as the smoke bomb ignited the nest in the eaves and no more garage or hornets!Robert

[country gent]

In a pinh we used aresol hair spray. didn't actually kill them but got the out of the air so they could be swatted easily. This mix sounds like a good deal. Especially with pets or children near. Also around livestock

[bruce drake]

I use a liquid soap, water and minced up habenero peppers mix and spray it on my plants as a means of killing the bugs and keeping rabbits off the greens.

[Markopolo]

I wonder if this would work on mosquito's and no see um's... I know it works on the meat bees...

[Smoke4320]

Might just work on fire ants too .. your coating the shell so they cant breath
question would be how fast do they die .. if a while they would be taking the coating into the nest and be spread around

I see experiment coming :) :)

[Skipper]

Instead of rice, give Cream of Wheat a try.

[Sur-shot]

I use a Lawn Tonic to to pull through my shallow well lawn pump. it fertilizes the yard and kills grass eaters real well, at the same time. The lethal ingredients for bugs is Listerine mouth wash and Dawn dish washing liquid, mixed. That combo should work for the wasp spray also.
The whole Lawn Tonic deal as developed by a master gardener is:
12 Beers, high test
12 Sodas, high test
6 cups Dawn
6 cups Listerine
6 cups Ammonia (hardware store strength)

Mix it is a 5 gal bucket and pull it through the intake side of a pump. Wet the yard first, then spray each zone one full rotation of a circular head, keep repeating per zone, until the mix is gone. Repeat the treatment every 30 days. After 3 months the bugs will be gone and any bare spots will be filling in. Note, use a reinforced 1/4 inch hose and a needle valve, start pulling the liquid with the pump running. The setup for the pump costs less than $10.00.
Ed

[Boolit_Head]

I used to have a cedar sided story and a half that the red wasps loved to nest in the eaves. Not much would get up there to the peak because it was so tall. A buddy got me a silver bullet fire extinguisher with a schrader valve on it to recharge the air. I filled it with water and put some dawn soap in it and charged up the air to 30 something psi. It would reach the eaves with ease and the red wasps would drop like rocks. Every evening as they were gathering on the siding before going in for the night I would take walk around the house. Seems the dawn would coat them and they could not breathe they would expire within a minute. Only way I found to control the buggars at that house.

[Geezer in NH]

Pressure sprayer and some soap works 100% for me by wasps and daubers.

[frankenfab]

Dawn and water is all that is really necessary.

[ghh3rd]

The dawn may work well, but the rice loads seem like so much more fun! I use ground walnut shells in mine...

[MT Gianni]

Soap is the killer, peppermint the identifier. The soap coats an insects thorax and they suffocate. For crawlers use chewing tobacco mixed with water. The nicotine is instant death when they crawl across it.

[gtrpickr]

I am gonna have to give these a try.

[Bookworm]

Mud daubers have never really bothered me.

We have the daubers around here, but unlike the red wasp (which seems to have a genetic coding to attack me - I have seen red wasps alter course from many yards away, specifically to come sting me, and then continue on with their day) which is very aggressive.
I pretty much leave the daubers alone, except when the nest is built in the exhaust of the weed-eater (precluding starting it).

The red wasp, on the other hand.... well, me and that species seem to have a Jeremiah Johnson thing going on. Attack on sight, fight to the death.

[jmort]

I have heard them referred to a mahogany wasps. Was told, may be true, kill one with force, not soap or spray, and they all go nuts like killer bees. Spoke with a guy working on my house and said he encountered a nest in a well pump house. Said they made him so mad he got a can of starter fluid and lit the stream on fire and killed them all. A little too intense for me, but I agree with other members, stater fluid make for a good incect killer. I don't use it as a flame thrower.

[bangerjim]

Anytime you spray anything that is designed to kill stuff, always put a few drops of dish soap in there. It breaks the surface tension on the surfaces (bugs, worms, leaves) and allows the stuff to stay in place and do the job. My chewing tobacco and dish soap killer is powerful stuff and is harmless except to pest bugs, especailly those flying ink bugs and their leaf-eating worms on my grape leaves.

Makes you wonder why anyone would EVER chew/smoke tobacco?!?!?!?

Banger

[Bookworm]

Your chewing tobacco concoction is absolutely NOT harmless to anything except pests.

It's a nicotinoid (sp?), a nicotine-based poison, and is lethal to almost everything, especially honeybees.
It is suspected to be one of the chief reasons for honeybees disappearing, due to the neurological damage it does. The current theory is that the honeybees get damaged to the extent that they cannot 'remember' where they live, and just fly around until they die.

Please stop using it.

[GRUMPA]

UPDATE,.......

After 4 days of spraying those Mud Daubers the population has decreased to what seems single digits. Now I could be exaggerating on the numbers here, but if I didn't get at least 250 of those goobers I would be surprised. Right now I'm getting the newly hatched ones that haven't gotten there full color yet.

I spent a good part of a couple of afternoons with spray bottle in hand standing in front of the truck. The trucks we park with the hoods open, and.....they thought that all those nooks and crannies were just for them, they thought wrong.

I watered yesterday, had a few, fully mature come into the tree well area, and although they got pelted with the home brew they flew off never to return.

There was mention of just using the soap and water, hate to say it but that just doesn't work, I tried.

Something in that Peppermint oil is the key to making it work.

Found out that Tomato leaves don't much care to be sprayed, they just wither and die in 3 days. So I'll need to remember that for next year.

Funny how mother nature works, the local Lizards almost follow me around. It kills flies too and when I go after the wasps I get some flies in the process.

I've almost gone through the first little bottle of Peppermint oil, but I ordered more for the remainder of the year and a couple more for just a little bit more than what it costs me for the first bottle, and I ordered a 4oz bottle this time.

[w5pv]

A fly swat works well also

[XDROB]

A fly swat works well also
Not when you have a swarm of hornets after you. And they will chase you way past their normal boundaries. At that point all I see is a frantic person waving the swatter around their head while running away.

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[OS OK]

I wish someone would come up with a homegrown solution for the dreaded 'star thistle' all I have that works every time is pulling them by hand.

[dualsport]

I hate wasps and will go out of my way to kill them. I got swarmed as a kid by the big black ones that live in the ground. Over a hundred bites/stings (?). I'm still getting even. Now I'm looking for a way to kill regular yellow jackets (wasps, not meat bees) that have invaded my lawn. I was going to go with a spray of malathion but you guys got me thinking of a better way to go. I do not want to harm the worms down there. Lawn spray with Dawn solution?

[Soundguy]

clove oil works as well.

[Blackwater]

Interesting thread. As a kid, I learned early on that shooting the nests of wasps with my BB gun got you stung pretty regularly, so .... I finally quit. I was a slow learner, but thought it was tremendously funny when I shot the nest, and it finally fell down. I kept them in the freezer for fish bait (excellent bait for panfish and cats!). But after being stung enough, I finally decided I needed to change techniques. They seemed to always build their nests in places where I wanted to go, and stood a risk of being stung, like by the ladder to the upstairs part of our old hay barn, etc. So there was an ongoing war between me and these pesky (and STRONG!) wasps. I finally got a small cupful of gasoline, and eased up near enough to be certain (relatively, at least) of my aim, and I'd throw the cup at the nest, and it'd kill them on contact. A .44 mag. couldn't have killed them any faster. But occasionally, the splash didn't reach one or two, and I'd have to race for all I was worth to not get stung. Apparently, they kind'a resent having gas thrown on them! As a kid, this was great fun, and a good challenge to not get stung (a battle I sometimes lost), and I'd never heard of Dawn being a wasp killer. The peppermint oil must not agree with them, like gasoline??? But insects CAN be very fragile if you find the right stuff to cast upon them.

Thanks for the tip. You don't really want to throw gasoline in some places, like on your house, etc. This is one I'll try to remember. It's "wasp season" here right now, and may need to use it. Need to get some peppermint oil, though. I'll be looking for it next trip to town.

[725]

Just an aside for the nicotine users: At work I was occasionally called upon kill dangerous dogs, injured animals, etc. We injected nicotine via syringe or "capture dart" fired from a rifle. It was an almost instant death. We loved it, but it was as dangerous as all get out. Once command figured out how evil nicotine can be, they took it away from us. The 12 ga. with bird shot was safer, by far. Even in downtown Baltimore, we "dispatched" a variety of things with the 12 ga. and didn't have to worry about much unintended stuff. That capture dart was like a poorly aimed torpedo. Kind of went where you wanted it to, and packed a real lethal punch wherever it ended up.

[tommag]

I came home today to accidently discover the yellow jackets had built a nest under the siding by my door. They bit me 3 times. I think I showed great bravery and stoicism as I calmly somersaulted and cartwheeled across the street! No time for homemade sprays. I continued to the store and bought a can of spray. We had a truce for several years, but that truce was broken today.

[starbits]

Many years ago we had a swimming pool that the wasps used as a watering hole. One day Dad decided to clean the tiles at the water level. The tile cleaner was lethal on the wasps. In two days Dad filled a large garbage can half full of wasps.

Starbits

[10-x]

Away from flamables , a can of starter fluid and bic lighter works.:mrgreen:

[XDROB]

Believe it or not, but Windex will kill bees and wasps pretty quick. It evaporates so quick it brings their body temp down so fast they don't survive.

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[Boolit_Head]

Away from flamables , a can of starter fluid and bic lighter works.:mrgreen:

At least it's satisfying... :)

[gon2shoot]

OK, we have LOTs of red wasp. The wife is allergic and was stung twice last week, about $250 each doctors visit.
I made up some of your concoction and went to war. A good solid hit worked well (I always hit them again after they went down, I'm not squemish about overkill) but my cheapie spray bottle lost the trigger return spring very fast. I grabbed a pump up spray bottle, 1 1/2 gal. and went on the attack with an "assualt" bug killer.

[Hannibal]

UPDATE,.......

After 4 days of spraying those Mud Daubers the population has decreased to what seems single digits. Now I could be exaggerating on the numbers here, but if I didn't get at least 250 of those goobers I would be surprised. Right now I'm getting the newly hatched ones that haven't gotten there full color yet.

I spent a good part of a couple of afternoons with spray bottle in hand standing in front of the truck. The trucks we park with the hoods open, and.....they thought that all those nooks and crannies were just for them, they thought wrong.

I watered yesterday, had a few, fully mature come into the tree well area, and although they got pelted with the home brew they flew off never to return.

There was mention of just using the soap and water, hate to say it but that just doesn't work, I tried.

Something in that Peppermint oil is the key to making it work.

Found out that Tomato leaves don't much care to be sprayed, they just wither and die in 3 days. So I'll need to remember that for next year.

Funny how mother nature works, the local Lizards almost follow me around. It kills flies too and when I go after the wasps I get some flies in the process.

I've almost gone through the first little bottle of Peppermint oil, but I ordered more for the remainder of the year and a couple more for just a little bit more than what it costs me for the first bottle, and I ordered a 4oz bottle this time.

Pardon me if I've missed it, but WHERE are you finding Peppermint Oil? Peppermint Extract is everywhere I look. Peppermint Oil is rare as Hen's teeth around here.

[Finster101]

Be careful with peppermint extract or oil as it will burn rather well.

[Hannibal]

Indeed. The bottle of extract is 91% alcohol and 9% Peppermint oil, according to the label.

[snowwolfe]

I didnt understand the original post. How much Dawn liquid do you mix with 16 ounces of water?

Good timing. Had a small nest forming next to the front door so hosed it down. Later in the day was looking at the .22 rifle I keep in the workshop ready to go and thought hmmmmm.......
Grabbed a flash light and opened the action, dang barrel was packed shut. Went to our other garage and grabbed the 10/22 off the wall and same thing. After cleaning them both will tape the muzzles shut with black tape. Next I checked the pee hole on my outboard and it was also plugged!

[Grmps]

Mischocyttarus flavitarsis Paper Wasps

People give these and bees a bad reputation. I have lived and worked around these most of my life, taken nests down with a hammer, worked with my face inches away from their nest, had them land and crawl on me multiple times. I have never been stung by a wasp! I was bit by one once, that did get my attention.
http://i.imgur.com/KgFUpxv.jpg (http://imgur.com/KgFUpxv)

Hornets and yellow jackets are a whole different story.

[GRUMPA]

Pardon me if I've missed it, but WHERE are you finding Peppermint Oil? Peppermint Extract is everywhere I look. Peppermint Oil is rare as Hen's teeth around here.


Indeed. The bottle of extract is 91% alcohol and 9% Peppermint oil, according to the label.


I didnt understand the original post. How much Dawn liquid do you mix with 16 ounces of water?

Good timing. Had a small nest forming next to the front door so hosed it down. Later in the day was looking at the .22 rifle I keep in the workshop ready to go and thought hmmmmm.......
Grabbed a flash light and opened the action, dang barrel was packed shut. Went to our other garage and grabbed the 10/22 off the wall and same thing. After cleaning them both will tape the muzzles shut with black tape. Next I checked the pee hole on my outboard and it was also plugged!

OK you folks.....Here's a link to where I got mine "AFTER" I bought a .5oz bottle at WallyWorld for $6. Mine was located right near the Pharmacy.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/8-fl-oz-Peppermint-Essential-Oil-100-Pure-Glass-Bottle-GreenHealth-/300400265396?epid=1822002328&hash=item45f14048b4:g:YuwAAOSwve5XOAz7

And it's a 1/4 TO 1/2 cup of Dawn "Original" dish soap mixed in the 16oz spray bottle. In other words the amount isn't what a person would call critical to make work, just no less than 1/4 cup and no more than 1/2 cup.

[Smoke4320]

If your are an amazon prime member this is cheaper 8 oz is $17.99 shipped or 4OZ for $9.99 shipped

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OEIBJRW/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_16?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1XLM9OGROVVWG

[Mytmousemalibu]

I won't lie, when I lived out in the country, a can of brake spray and a running propane torch does quite well on any bug and the satisfaction is through the roof! Sweet, sweet revenge it is!

[Hannibal]

OK you folks.....Here's a link to where I got mine "AFTER" I bought a .5oz bottle at WallyWorld for $6. Mine was located right near the Pharmacy.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/8-fl-oz-Peppermint-Essential-Oil-100-Pure-Glass-Bottle-GreenHealth-/300400265396?epid=1822002328&hash=item45f14048b4:g:YuwAAOSwve5XOAz7

And it's a 1/4 TO 1/2 cup of Dawn "Original" dish soap mixed in the 16oz spray bottle. In other words the amount isn't what a person would call critical to make work, just no less than 1/4 cup and no more than 1/2 cup.

Thanks! looked in 3 different Wal-Marts, no Peppermint Oil, just Peppermint Extract. I'll order some.

[fiberoptik]

I have heard them referred to a mahogany wasps. Was told, may be true, kill one with force, not soap or spray, and they all go nuts like killer bees. Spoke with a guy working on my house and said he encountered a nest in a well pump house. Said they made him so mad he got a can of starter fluid and lit the stream on fire and killed them all. A little too intense for me, but I agree with other members, stater fluid make for a good incect killer. I don't use it as a flame thrower.

WD-40 as well.


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[Soundguy]

Mischocyttarus flavitarsis Paper Wasps

People give these and bees a bad reputation. I have lived and worked around these most of my life, taken nests down with a hammer, worked with my face inches away from their nest, had them land and crawl on me multiple times. I have never been stung by a wasp! I was bit by one once, that did get my attention.
http://i.imgur.com/KgFUpxv.jpg (http://imgur.com/KgFUpxv)

Hornets and yellow jackets are a whole different story.

In our area, the paper wasps are mostly Polistes Carolina.

[izzyjoe]

I've this thread, and I will add that I've been experimenting with straight Dawn in a pump sprayer. The last couple weeks I've been killing them in the yard late in the evening, they like to land in the grass and that's when I blast them. It takes about 8-10 seconds with a good hit, but it kills them dead, it also kills fire ants too! I just stomp the ground to stir them up, and spray them good. I takes about 5 five minutes to kill them. I have started an all out assault on wasps!

[Soundguy]

I'll remove wasps that are in areas I need to be in, but I generally won't go genocidal on them removing them from my property enmasse. Wasps are hunters. In my area, many wasps kill spiders. I like wasps just a hair better than spiders.. So I leave wasps in areas I dont frequent to give the spiders something to worry about. ;)

[fiberoptik]

I tried Sea Spray thinking it would be like WD-40; boy were they ever stirred up! Didn't kill any either, just made em rabid!


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