Yellow jackets are starving right now. During the development of the nest
the workers get fed by other workers inside the hive. In the last week the
reproductive males and future queens have taken flight and now the hive
structure has broken down, the workers are not being fed anymore and all the
members except the mated queens will wander and die. So the workers are
particularly hungry and aggressive right now. They will all be dead with the
first frost.

Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer, Teacher
Snohomish County

_____

From: tweeters-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu
[mailto:tweeters-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of debsstuff
at comcast.net
Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2009 10:25 PM
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: [Tweeters] Anyone else have problems with wasps?




Good evening all,



Has anyone else noticed a huge increase in the number of wasps lately? My
hummers are being real carefull around the feeder. I finally put a wasp
trap about 3 feet below the feeder and it seems to help a lot. It's managed
to kill about 30 or more in the 2 days I've had it up. At times the wasps
are actually chasing the hummers off. We've looked around for a hive but we
haven't found one. I'm not using anything that would hurt the birds but I
think I'll pick up a couple more traps and hope that does the trick. We've
had a big increase in the number of hummers when the weather got hot - but
hummers tend to come and go at various times during the season anyway.



D. Lewis

North Bend, WA

Debsstuffat comcastdotnet