The leaves on the magnolia tree in front of my house finally all fell on Friday and yesterday we found these:
Not one, but THREE hornet nests in one tree. The one in the middle is huge, at least 18" tall by a foot wide. Never seen nests close together like this.
Yeesh. I've lived in this subdivision since 1979 and never saw even one hornet nest until about 15 years ago.
I was running a leaf blower underneath them last weekend, and my lawn guy was here Thursday mowing. Both those activities are known to aggravate hornets so I'm virtually certain the nests are no longer active.
We had a couple hard frosts a week or so ago so I think they are just about dead. However, I hosed them down with wasp spray (I have a pole that holds the can and allows me to get it right up to the nest). I saw one hornet come out of the nest on the right when I sprayed, but nothing else.
It's going to be warm this week but hopefully it'll cool off again next week and I can take them down.
They'll give me a nice supply of wadding material for my muzzleloaders. They can be used between the powder charge and a patched roundball, or over-powder and over-shot wads in a smoothbore. I've been wanting to try that for awhile so I'm not entirely unhappy about finding these things out front.
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Went to collect a wasp nest with my cousin one time. The area below his folks' place had been cleared off by men with bill hooks a few days prior. Thorny bushes were laying all over and made accessing the low hanging nest quite difficult, but we got there. We only had an old pump type poison sprayer and some Baygon liquid for the same. He got up close and started pumping and I started shaking the branch the nest was on - and nothing happened. Then we saw the other side of the nest was caved in, probably by the crew that had cleared the area. Instead of going the long way around to get back up to his folks' place we decided to climb the 15 foot or so cliff. My cousin went first, carrying the pump. I was behind and a little neighbor boy behind me. My cousin reached the top, tossed the pump over the edge and pulled himself up to throw his leg over the side and yelled "Jump!" We all landed near each other and crouched there. I'd NO idea WHY he'd yelled jump but knew him well enough to ask "How high?" on the way up, or to try to land carefully on the way down with no questions asked. It turned out he'd tossed that pump right into a swarm of africanized honey bees. They swarmed around us and finally one stung one of us. That released pheromones and the swarm got REALLY aggravated. Somehow we didn't notice those thorn bushes on the ground on our way out of the area! Lost my rubber thong sandal and we had to wait a while before going back for it. Anyway, collecting wasp nests can be exciting!
Does the wasp spray you used contain oils? That's something to keep in mind if you plan to use it in cartridges or shells. You don't want any oils messing up your powder charge!
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