Stopping the Dangerous Paper Wasp!

Paper Wasps are responsible for a large number of stingings all over North America every year according to Medical and pest control professionals. The wasps stingsare often serious, and can sometimes even threaten life! These “Paper Wasps” build their hives usually very near to structures around humans, often around food or garbage, in the eaves of a house, inside flower pots, or around other kinds of structures around people, and can be a very big problem, especially during the end of summer into the fall moths. Treatment of paper wasps typically includes chemicals like tempo 1% Dust (1% cyfluthrin) for example, but the use of safe, organic products is preferred by almost everyone to keep family and pets safe.

Kimberly Schofield M.S. of Texas A&M’s Agrilife research and Extension center-Program Specialist of Urban Integrated Pest Management, started her tests on March 5th of 2009. She argued the effects of painting the eaves of homes that are riddled with paper wasp infestation with celestial blue Glidden ultra hide 3517 Oil semi-gloss paint would stop paper wasps from building nests in those eaves. This was accidentally discovered by the girl scout Camp Bette Perot in Palestine TX while trying to find a way to stop the wasp sting reports there. Kimberly’s test ran from March 5th until October 7, 2009.

Paper Wasps are a problem, stinging many people all over the U.S. She seen this as a medical problem and so the theory behind this test was the resemblance of the color celestial bluewas so similar to the natural color of the sky, which would influence thepaper wasps to build their nests somewhere else. A control building was chosen and maintained without painting the eaves to be compared to the test buildings and the test was prooving very successful for a little over 2 months.

Unfortuantely, on June 20th, the camp treated all of the buildings with Tempo 1%because of many wasp stings being reported, which affected the results of this test. Before the tempo treatment, there was signifficant difference in hives being found in painted buildings compared to the control one. There are plans to continue the test in 2010 using latex-based celestial blue paint to see if the results were improved by the oil in the first test’s paint.