Every year the summer season brings not only warmth with it, but also wasps, who feel just as comfortable in this warmth in our gardens as we do. As important as these useful insects may be for nature, those who want to enjoy their favorite spot in the garden without a care, want to drive the wasps out of the immediate vicinity, and thoughts about effective protection against wasp stings in the garden are not just overcautious natures. In fact, only the right behavior leads to peaceful coexistence with the wasps.
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Effectively drive away wasps
Wasp colonies grow in summer, so by August or September at the latest, more wasps could be buzzing around your garden than you would like. However, there are a few ways to successfully reduce the number of wasps around the seat in the garden to a minimum:
1. Prudent gardeners take precautions
You do this by making sure that there are mainly plants near your favorite spot in the garden that the wasps have little or no use for. There are many such plants:
- Flowers with deep calyxes
- Bud bloomers
- Tulips
- Hyazinthen
- Double dahlias
- Stuffed daisies
- Forsythien
- Pansy hybrids
- japanese cherries
- Geranien
- Conifers
If you group such plants around your seat, but offer the wasps plenty of food further back in the garden, you have already done a lot to be able to enjoy your seat in the garden. Wasps like all plants that are considered friendly to bees, e.g. B. nectar-rich and flat flowering plants like all Cotoneaster species.
2. Avoid wasp lure offers
Open food on the garden table is just as forbidden as open drinks in glasses or cans, continuously and always. If you really consistently never offer the wasps food at your garden table, they will never discover what a rich feast they miss here. Because wasps are quite capable of learning – they are able to remember where they have often had great hunting successes in the past. So it makes more than sense to take care that your garden table is not chosen as a “wasp paradise”.
3. Distraction feeding for wasps
If you can’t say goodbye to every flower near your garden table, even wasps liked, you can keep the wasps away with a little “bribe”: offer them a delicious distraction feed at a sufficient distance from your garden table! You can e.g. B. cut a ripe grape in half and present it with the cut surfaces facing up on a plate a few meters from the garden table on the garden floor. As a rule, the wasps like to grab something that is so easy to consume.
4. Wasp-friendly clothing
Do you like to wear white t-shirts? Then do that, especially in the garden. Wasps react much less to white clothing than to brightly colored flowers, which is why beekeepers wear white protective suits. You could e.g. B. Buy white garden T-shirts that are always ready in the cloakroom.
5. Better not to use wasp traps
The well-known wasp traps, the bottles with sugar water or beer, are not for the faint-hearted anyway – the average person takes little pleasure in watching any living being die painfully by drowning. But they are also counterproductive because the first wasps to fly into the trap inexperienced do not yet know that they will not come out again. So you first try to fly out again. Wasps cannot perform a waggle dance with which bees draw the attention of their conspecifics to abundant sources of food, but they can smell incredibly good. The wasp, which tries again and again to get out of the bottle, distributes enough odorous substances in the area to draw the attention of many friends … If at some point it can no longer
6. Targeted deterrence of wasps?
If you are looking for a means to specifically deter wasps, you will find numerous commercials that promise just that. There are sure to be agents that work – these are usually neurotoxins that could also have the same effect on your health. In most cases the wasps find harmless remedies just as harmless (or they don’t even notice them), so if you look for any precise indication of the effectiveness of one of these remedies, you will be out of luck, just promises.
You are welcome to try out which scents the wasps in your region do not like, you will find long lists of suggestions on the Internet. Citronella e.g. B., the oil for fragrance lamps, is often traded as a safe tip, while other testimonials do not attest the fragrance any success.
7. Preparations for the next year – remove wasp nests in winter
While removing an inhabited wasp nest is quite a hassle, it’s safe to remove the abandoned nests in winter. By the end of October at the latest, there should actually be no more life in a wasp’s nest. You are welcome to test whether a “miracle wasp” has survived longer by roughly nudging it from a safe distance and as often as you like.
They do no harm to the wasps, because this nest would definitely not be populated again next spring. If you want no more wasp nests to be built near this nest in the next year, you should remove the abandoned nest. The place where the nest was attached should also be cleaned thoroughly and with tensides and fairly large areas if you do not want to resettle in the next year. Why? As I said, wasps learn, and they obviously pass what they have learned on in some way, for it is known that the abandoned nests are attractive to the next queens looking for a place to build their nests. Since these queens never repopulate an abandoned nest, they start from the knowledge
If you don’t want to see this miracle of nature realized in your attic, it’s time to put the nest away and clean – you also prevent other migrating insect colonies from settling there, who like to use foreign buildings.
If your wasps were talented in terms of design, it can be worthwhile to prepare the nest as an exhibit. B. is taken to school by your children. The structures are quite fragile and fine, you can achieve a bit of fixation with hairspray, if you want to prepare a cross-section to be durable, you’d better use spray paint.
8. Wasp-free house in the evening
Wasps like light, and since they can see a lot better than we do, even very little light. Therefore, you should enter your house in the dark and close all windows and doors before you turn on the lights inside. If you like to open the windows in the evening, even when you are sitting in front of the television, you should secure these windows with insect protection nets so that the nocturnal light sources in the house do not attract wasps.
If a wasp does get lost in the house, it is usually sufficient if you switch off the light for a while; it usually flies out on its own, where a variety of scents beckon. If the wasp seems to prefer the scents in your house, just take a jar and place it over the wasp, slide a piece of paper underneath to serve as a lid when you turn the jar over, and take the clinging wasp out into the open.
9. Wasp banishment for allergy sufferers
If you suspect that you are allergic to wasps, here is your “timetable”:
- Test at the allergy store
- only about five percent of the population are actually allergic to wasp venom
- An insect venom allergy can usually be cured by desensitization
- The largest possible banishment of wasps is an exhausting affair
- First of all, the garden is designed to be insect-repellent
- Then the house is made as tight as possible
- Dealing with wasps should still be practiced, you cannot avoid them entirely
Overall, it can be said that the best way to effectively drive wasps away is definitely not to attract them in the first place.
Protection against wasp stings
Whatever you do to repel wasps, it won’t free you from seeing a single wasp every now and then in your life. And if you don’t want to avoid every café and beer garden over the summer, you will encounter quite a few wasps there in late summer. Which does not have to mean that you will also get a wasp sting, at least not if you really follow the tips below – the best protection against wasp stings is a kind of step-by-step plan that complements the suggestions just listed:
- Knowledge also helps against panic
For example, knowing which wasp species are harmless anyway (all except the “German Wasp” and the “Common Wasp”) and how short the time is when the wasps appear aggressive – just a little over a month, between the end of August, They are no longer looking for meat for the larvae, but for sugar for themselves, until they die in mid-October at the latest.
But also the knowledge that wasps only appear aggressive, but are not – they do not come flying towards us to sting us, but because they are looking for food. But above all the knowledge that only 15 people per year feel more than a little burning or itching from a wasp sting – with 80 million inhabitants in Germany, this means that the probability of being struck by lightning is greater.
- Correct behavior
Correct behavior is probably the best and, for panics, the most strenuous protection against wasp stings:
- If you stay calm, calm, calm, when you are surrounded by wasps or are being flown to, you have actually already won.
- That means: stay absolutely calm, do not hit at the wasps, do not blow at the wasps, do not kick the wasps.
- Easily put, me prankster? Yes, of course, but success simply says that this is the best method.
- Practice helps, again and again, and the wasp that flies close to your face doesn’t want to mess with you either, it needs it to see clearly.
- Whenever there is an unusually high number of wasps buzzing around you, it is a good idea to check your perfume and cosmetics.
Conclusion
One can live quite well with wasps if one does not belong to the – exceptionally rare – allergy sufferers. It is certainly possible for every rational person to learn so much about wasps and how to deal with them that they can behave in a relaxed manner when they meet a wasp.