This bald faced hornet nest was spotted near a trail in Vernon.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Nicola Shanks

It's the time of year when wasps are most active in Kamloops and the Okanagan, and this year is a particularly big one for the insects.

Matthew Wright with Orkin Canada in Kelowna is fielding a high number of calls about nuisance yellow jacket wasps, which make nests both in the ground, on buildings and in trees.

“I’d say there are definitely more wasps around this year, and they’re more aggressive right now at the end of their cycle, trying to get as much food as they can,” he said.

Most calls coming in are about yellow jacket wasps and bald face hornets, which are not hornets, rather they are a subspecies of yellow jacket. The paper wasp is another common one in the region, but Wright said those ones are not as active this year.

Last week, Nicola Shanks captured video footage of a bald face hornet nest located near a hiking trail in Vernon.

“The hive looked unused when I first saw it mid-August, but a few days later, I took the video with many hornets,” she said in a message to iNFOnews.ca. “I watched for a little while as they quietly moved around, likely going in and out.”

The hive is enormous, located in a pine tree roughly eight feet off the ground, two feet tall and one foot wide.

“What I found interesting was that there were no buzzing sounds,” Shanks said. “I gather the danger is in the disturbance of it, it’s probably fine if left alone.”

A hive in the woods is one thing, but having aggressive wasps fighting for your barbecue on your patio is another.

Wright suggested a couple of things to deter them when dining outdoors.

“You can get yellow jacket traps and there's a homemade trap you can make that works really well. You hang a piece of meat like spam on a rope over a bucket of water and they’ll gorge themselves and fall into the water and drown.”

Queen wasps are getting ready to hibernate in leaf litter for the winter, and as nights start getting colder, the worker wasps will start dying off.

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