Kitchen Garden Forum

If you are putting wasp traps out they are more attracted to something a bit more acidic than jam or a sugar syrup. I use up some old home made wine which is so old the labels are illegible. The wasps love it.

I add some vinegar after watching how they always go for mint sauce. It's not working though, they are still eating our untreated garden furniture.

They are making their nests out of the wood Geoff so perhaps they'll go for a drink afterwards.

They are late making nests, we are getting the drunken crawling ones now, maybe from Plumpuddings wine!!

They have not turned up here yet but one of the plot holders told me he just blows up brown paper bags & hangs them in the trees & they think that is a resident wasps nest & he doesn't have too much bother. As I really meant to buy one of these type of look alike hive things & completely forgot I will try this when they do show up! Not this weekend though as raining this weekend - well fingers crossed anyway!

Speaking from recent experience, hot vinegar certainly attracts all the wasps in the neighbourhood! I made a large batch of apple chutney over the weekend, keeping the windows and doors open because of the strong smell of cooking apples and onions in malt vinegar. But I soon had to shut them, because wasps came from everywhere. So my advice to catch them: heat some malt vinegar in a bottle, perhaps with a touch of sugar, and wait for the swarms to arrive.
(By the way, I think wasps are very useful insects and I would never deliberately trap or kill them ......)

A new revelation this year about sweetcorn.
Our Lark sweetcorn is sweeter in taste than our Earligold. ~

For the first time ever we have seen what is attacking our ripe Lark cobs... wasps.

That's interesting. My sweetcorn, also Lark, is in the greenhouse. When I push through it to open and shut the ventilators I often disturb a wasp but I never thought they were attacking the corn, I'll have to look more closely. There are some with tassels missing that I assumed was mice, is that what they are doing?

The best wasp trap I've seen was in kafolonia in Greece a few years ago ,it was a plastic bottle hung upside down in a tree with the stopper on ,at the top was a small hole around half an inch diameter into this was a piece of round plastic about two inches long with most of it sticking out of the bottle slightly inclined ,I think it was honey that was in the bottom it was hard to see as every bottle was half filled with dead wasps

I've put a couple more traps in and topped up the others. They are working well and nothing escapes so im not responsible for UK-wide drunken wasps . They don't seem to be very big this year, perhaps there aren't the big females about at this time of the year.