We have a little abandoned cat that we’ve been feeding for the past couple of years (Our neighbors abandoned her. Bringing her into our house is, alas, not an option. I’ve been trying to find her a forever home, but so far, no luck)
All of a sudden, in the past week, yellow jackets have discovered her food bowl. We get yellow jackets every year, but I’ve never seen them glom onto the cat food like this. They get into the bowl and actually start fighting over it (in fact, this evening, I saw a couple independently trying to drag away pieces of kibble, while others where lying nearby, having been stung to death by their fellows). The problem, of course, is that the poor cat can hardly eat. I put the kibble out first thing in the morning, but as soon as the sun clears the horizon, the damned yellow jackets are out. By the time they finally clear off in the evening, the local raccoons and skunks are ready to come along and demolish what’s left.
I managed to feed her tonight by giving her some canned food in a different location (she ate it up quickly enough that the hornets didn’t find it before she was done). I’ve been watching to see if I can tell where the yellow jackets are coming from (If I can discover that, I can get an exterminator out to eradicate them. No mercy for yellow jackets in this household. They are the Hells Angels of the insect world). But I’m perplexed as to why the yellow jackets are a problem all of a sudden, when I’ve been feeding this cat outdoors for a couple of years. Skunks, raccoons, other cats…all of these get into her food, and she’s managed to work around them. But yellow jackets? They eat meat, true, and they’ll often bother you at picnics and such, but I’ve never seen so many frantically trying to get at cat food.
These are yellow jackets, if you’re fortunate enough to have never encountered them:
You’ll be looking for ground nests. If you do find it, you can pour hot soapy (dish soap) water in the hole, and cover the opening.
I also found this:
“Yellow jackets nest in the ground. They only fly during daylight, and spend the nighttime hours all in the nest…so if you want to kill them all and not poison your groundwater and everybody else’s, do this: Locate the nest hole, wait till night, turn a 5-gallon bucket upside down over the nest. First put about 2 gallons of DRY sand in the bucket. When morning comes, the yellow jackets will crawl up as they are accustomed to doing, thru the sand into the bucket. They can’t escape from there, and can’t crawl down because the sand is dry and won’t let them, besides their instinct will make them go up. The sun’s heat during the next 2-3 days will kill them all. The only ones left in the nest will not be able to survive without the support group, now all dead. It’s cheap, and sure. Leave the bucket in place for 3 days at least, put a weight on it if neccessary to keep dogs, kids etc from turning it over while it’s working.”
A gasoline solution, but so as not to contaminate the environment:
“They are easy to kill, with no more effort than checking the mail. Just put a damp gas rag in a large Mason jar and place it upside down over the hole. Push it down in the ground and pack a little dirt around the outside. Do this after dark, and by 9am you’ll have no more YJ’s and no polluted ground water or dead grass.”
You could also place food bait (perhaps something the cat is uninterested in?) and water at another location to draw them away from where the cat is fed.
We were eating at an outdoor restaurant one summer day. There was a bit of roast beef from my wife’s sandwich sitting at the edge of her plate. We watched, fascinated, as a Yellow Jacket chewed a tiny strip from the meat, rolling it up as he went. Then, with the meat held in his foremost legs, he flew off. Several minutes late he or one of his hive mates returned and repeated the performance. This continued for the hour or so that we sat there. Very cool.
In the UK we call them “wasps”. I understand that in the US that might be an ethnic slur.
Yeah, we’ve had a ground nest in the garden. There is a wonderful can of expanding mastic impregnated with insecticide.
Once you’ve find the hole, you just plug it up with the spray from the can. I’ve also had wasps building nests in the loft. THAT took three cans of insecticide and the dyson vacuum-cleaner, which was the only way I could reach the inaccessible thing.
When they were in the loft they were coming down the wall cavity and exiting by a crack in the bathroom. So we had exhausted wasps appearing in ones and twos for a week before we realised what was happening.
Yep, no mercy for wasps here, either.
I haven’t seen them attack catfood, so far. That would be scary. Actually, the catfood does get attacked by slugs - we live near a stream - but that is not happening in the hot weather.
I would be inclined to thing the manufacturer has changed to formula. Maybe they’ve added more sugar. I know cats aren’t supposed to be able to taste sweetness. I never really trusted that little factoid. Cats tuck into bowls of milk readily enough.
I’ve seen the Yellowjackets several times, the Fond Du Lac jazz festival, Milwaukee jazz festival and of course many times down in Chicago. They’re some pretty cool cats.
Have you checked with your local vector control district to see if they remove nests on private property? Is there a no kill cat shelter this cat could go to? You’ll likely see an increase in other even less desirable insect species once the predatory yellow jackets have been eliminated. They love flies, who in turn love to poop every time they land on something.
A big part of the concern is that our yellowjackets are highly aggressive. I’ve been attacked twice since we’ve lived here…once when I was walking down the driveway carrying my harp (every try running uphill carrying an unwieldy musical instrument while trying to fend off a hoard of hornets?) and once when I was simply walking my dog past the bottom of our driveway. The fact that they’re coming up on the porch in such numbers suggests that the nest is somewhere near the main entry to the house (really the only usable entry) so it’s going to have to go, if I can locate it.
Their behavior with the cat food really baffles me, however. They’re omnivores, so they’ll go after just about anything, but I’ve never seen this kind of almost frantic behavior, and I’ve certainly never seen so many of them going crazy for dry kitty kibble. I’m thinking, like IB, that the manufacturer may have changed the formula.
For right now, I’m dealing with the problem by giving Ellie (that’s the cat) canned food first thing in the morning and right after dusk in the evening (before the skunks come out). She eats that all in one go, rather than nibbling throughout the day as she does with the kibble, so there’s less time for the yellowjackets to find it, and it’s there during a time of day when they’re usually less active.
Here’s what an exterminator told me: The hole you see them fly out of is seldom just the nest. There is usually a central main nest with satellite nests, all connected together and each with an entry/exit hole of its own. Since redundancy is a normal security feature of these nest complexes, IMHO a yellowjacket infestation should probably be best handled by a pro if you’re actually interested in results. I had an infestation in my yard and I was surprised to see how extensive the nest complex actually was; his main hope was that it didn’t extend into neighbors’ yards, because then, no matter how successful the extemination may be in your own, if you don’t get the rest they still stand a chance to survive, regroup, and reinfest.
When it comes to yellowjackets, i definitely agree…go with the pros. There’s a service up here that we’ve used before, and if I can find where they’re coming from, I’ll give them a call.
It’s a safety issue too, really. The pros have the long-handled wands they can use, but even with those, the critters that aren’t knocked down immediately usually come boiling out of the nest looking for a fight.
I would say yellowjackets are very territorial rather than aggressive. I don’t know how the seasons run where you are located but as nectar sources and prey items decrease the colony starts to forage for non-traditional food sources. If the colony is under stress the foragers become even more desperate to find suitable food. If the cat food is a grocery store brand than the formula changes with every batch but I suspect the wasps would still be foraging there no matter what. It’s likely close and convenient, why go any further?
Again I would suggest the county vector control district might be a good place to start. In most California counties they control yellowjackets for residents.
I’d agree with that. Perhaps “assertive” would be a better word. They’re extremely curious about any interloping presence, and they’ll get up close to you to warn you off before they ever sting you. And it’s a tactic that works pretty well, too: no one in their right mind wants to incur the wrath of yellowjackets or hornets. You’d have to be actually interfering with, or be perceived as interfering with, the nest or individuals to get stung. But it occurs to me that their sense of territory seems to extend beyond the nest area to wherever they are working at the moment, too: as far as the yellowjacket’s concerned, your pizza ain’t necessarily yours anymore. While I’ve been divebombed, even landed on, I’ve only been stung when I stepped on 'em or the like.
Which isn’t to say that they don’t pose a hazard; they do, of course.
I had one fly into the open collar of my shirt while I was cycling years ago and it stung me several times on my back before I could stop and reach around to crush it. I did not sleep well for some time after that.
A yellowjacket getting caught in clothing is definitely a situation where you will almost inevitably get stung; it’s trapped and for all it knows it’s being aggressed against. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Come to think of it, last evening a fellow told me he’d gotten stung on the tongue twice this summer, now. They’d wind up in his mouth, but he chalked it up to barrelling around slackjawed on his bike, and that it occurred to him that maybe he should try bicycling with his mouth shut. I’d say that makes sense.
When I was a toddler I stood on a wasps’ nest, which meant that all the angry wasps had no place to go but up the leg of my pants. To add insult, the first adult on the scene tried to kill the wasps inside my trousers by hitting them, which I interpreted as a spanking.
Luckily, I don’t remember it. I do remember getting stung twice on the eyelid when I was 7 or so.
While they’re usually burrowers, last year I had yellowjackets nest in my car’s driver’s side mirror housing. The car had been sitting idle for a few months, so no reason for them not to set up house. I found out about them when I got in and slammed the door shut. Angry, venomous little buggers zooming all over the place. It took about three applications - of whatever I did - for them to finally pack it up and leave, but for a couple of months afterward one or two would still come back checking to see if it was okay to move back in.
When we lived in North Carolina, we would often have trouble with yellowjackets hovering around filling nozzles and gas tanks of our cars when we were gassing up. I don’t know what it was about the gas that attracted them. I haven’t seen that here in California.
When I was in high school in Spokane (Inland Northwest) I worked selling popcorn, hot dogs, snow cones, and soda from a cart in a downtown park. We used to just dread August, because that was when the yellowjackets would come looking for sweets. My poor hands got stung so many times…the nasty little buggers were very attached to the soda taps and the pumps of the snow cone syrup bottles, and didn’t like us horning in on “their” sugar fix.
To my knowledge traps, commercial or otherwise are not effective, except for making a tidy profit for the manufacturers. The most effective removal method if it has to occur is to kill the colony with a long distance wasp and hornet aerosol spray. Applied after dusk at an entrance for two or three consecutive evenings ought to eliminate the whole colony. Of course a common control method in some areas is to use poisoned catfood.
I once had one fly under the face plate of my motorcycle helmet while barreling along at 60 mph. By the time I could pull over and rip the helmet off, my forehead was ready for my audition as a Klingon extra in Star Trek TNG.
