# Getting rid of Dam ground Bees?



## mojack (Jun 6, 2004)

This year seems to be bad for ground bees or some call them sweat bees.My son got stung 11 times day before yesterday. He was cutting down a cedar tree and they came from no where and got him.
I was on the tractor doing a little clean up work and hit a nest by a stump and the dam things got me a few times. Had to run for the pond leaving the tractor running. Got my carharts on and heavy gloves and got the tractor turned off. I will make a visit back to the nest in the morning and give them some gasoline to drink.
Is there any kind of animal or bird that likes to eat these dam no good bees.
If there is I will be getting some. The only way I know how to get rid of them is to poor gas or diesel down the hole.]
Does anyone have a better method.

Thanks.
Jack SC Mo.


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## sisterpine (May 9, 2004)

Jack: never heard of ground bees, are they only in your area?


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## diane (May 4, 2002)

:waa: Jack.....if there is we have never found it!! The old gas down the hole trick after dark is what we do. This year we had such flooding here in Michigan in so many of our fields etc. that I think we must have drown them as, so far, I have not seen a one. On the other hand, I have NEVER seen any more yellow jackets than I have this year. They are nesting everywhere and I have been having to almost carry my sting kit with me constantly.


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## Paul Wheaton (May 10, 2002)

We have them mighty bad. Yellow jackets. For a while we had about 100 per square foot. When we did pastured poultry, we put some three week old chicks out and they ate one. 

We have lots of yellow jacket trap experiments going on, but now that the weather is cooling, we're down to about 1 yellow jacket per square yard. So interest in the traps is waning.


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## mojack (Jun 6, 2004)

Sisterpine,
We have quite allot of them here in Missouri. We also had them when we lived in Oregon. Many times we would sept on a nest when we were out hunting. They are very aggressive.

Jack SC MO


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## mistletoad (Apr 17, 2003)

Sweat bees are an important pollinator, I suggest leaving them alone if you do any kind of gardening. Of course pouring gas into the ground would make gardening all but impossible too.
Sweat bees are very common in the US - tiny little guys less than 1/2 inch long - most I've seen are a metallic green, very pretty. They sting but it doesn't hurt much - nothing like a yellow jacket or hornet sting. They are persistent though - I tilled through a nest area last year (didn't know it was there until they let me know) and those things were all over me for the rest of the day!


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## Little Quacker in NC (May 9, 2002)

Hi there! For anyone who is trying to get rid of anything, please do NOT use gasoline, fire or other harmful substances. You are only hurting yourself and your ground when you do this. Go- bug is out there and would have some better ideas for you. Or, do a GOOGLE search about "sweat bees" or "yellow jackets" or whatever you are trying to get rid of. There are many ways to do it without messing up your soil.It just takes a bit of research and thought. 

good luck to those with these little buggers, they can be a pain I know.

LQ


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## mammabooh (Sep 1, 2004)

I had a big nest (yellow jackets) in the ground inside my garden last year. I waited until about 10:00 at night and covered the hole with a large, clear glass bowl. They tried to escape in the morning but couldn't. I read somewhere that they wouldn't make a new exit hole and I don't believe they did. It took about a week or so, but they all died. I left the bowl on there for several weeks, just in case there were more down there to hatch, but I didn't see any. (By the way...there were HUNDREDS of them piled up dead under the bowl!)

If the holes are in a nice flat area, this will work, otherwise, you might have to get more creative.


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## diane (May 4, 2002)

Oh pleeeeeseeeeeeee...........sweat bees are NOT ground bees or yellow jackets. Very big difference!!! :no: Fire does NOT hurt your ground....fire BURNS gas.......gas gone.........yellow jackets and ground bees gone. Earth sterile and ready for what ever you want it to be ready for.......minus the vicious bees that were previously there.


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## Gercarson (Nov 2, 2003)

I've been stung by a lot of insects - including bees, wasps and hornets - but the ones that nest in the ground are absolutely the worst. I've never experienced such pain - these hornets (whatever) are so aggressive and tenacious that you really can't run away from them. I used black flag wasp and hornet spray (shoots up to 15 feet) at night and it worked on one nest, there are more but don't want to go looking for them. Big Ouch!!!


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## breezynosacek (Nov 7, 2003)

mammabooh said:


> I had a big nest (yellow jackets) in the ground inside my garden last year. I waited until about 10:00 at night and covered the hole with a large, clear glass bowl. They tried to escape in the morning but couldn't. I read somewhere that they wouldn't make a new exit hole and I don't believe they did. It took about a week or so, but they all died. I left the bowl on there for several weeks, just in case there were more down there to hatch, but I didn't see any. (By the way...there were HUNDREDS of them piled up dead under the bowl!)
> 
> If the holes are in a nice flat area, this will work, otherwise, you might have to get more creative.


That is an awesome idea! Thanks for sharing that!

We don't have a problem with them this year but there are cycles to everything.

Last couple of years we had wasps something aweful. This year hardly a one of them around but we were swamped with Japanese Hornets!!!

Those suckers are huge! We borrowed a bug zapper from a neighbor and they were so big they couldn't fit all the way through the grid but we did get rid of a number of them that way.

Imagine a hornet almost 2 inches long, it will fly at night, and it likes red orange and brown clothing and is attracted to those colors of people. If you kill one they will come after you. They can fly at 25 miles an hour.

Nice critters. They had my pears taken hostage and I had to wait and go pick them in the flood and rain (got 7" of rain and went out there in the middle of it to get any). When those suckers are standing in between my pear butter and my tummy they are going out!


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## mojack (Jun 6, 2004)

Gercarson,
I agree with you they hurt worse than any sting I have ever had. I just paid them a visit with rag soaked in diesel and a sprayer filled with diesel. threw the lit rag on the nest and began to spray diesel into the fire and no more bees or hornets what ever they are.
Our goats have allot of encounters with these aggressive hornets when they are out in the woods. I know I will be watching closer for them now.

Jack SC,MO.






Gercarson said:


> I've been stung by a lot of insects - including bees, wasps and hornets - but the ones that nest in the ground are absolutely the worst. I've never experienced such pain - these hornets (whatever) are so aggressive and tenacious that you really can't run away from them. I used black flag wasp and hornet spray (shoots up to 15 feet) at night and it worked on one nest, there are more but don't want to go looking for them. Big Ouch!!!


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## gobug (Dec 10, 2003)

I'm not certain, but I think sweat bees are solitary - no nests or hives. It sounds like your bees are yellow jackets, as guessed already.

I really like the inverted glass bowl idea - no pesticide at all. Just don't do this if the nest is in the ground against the house. 

Someone recently posted a wasp solution of cutting the bottom off a 2 liter clear soda bottle, fixing a paper towel inside using the lid, soaking the towel in a little pesticide spray, and duct taping the assembly over the entry hole. This is really a great idea because you use minimal pesticide and you can throw it away (there really is no "away"). Since the yellow jackets that emerged died quickly, the nest was not alarmed and didn't look for an alternate exit.

For future reference using gasoline or diesel fuel will  poison the soil. It won't all burn away. It is far worse than a little wasp spray. Some EPA superfund sites are where gas or diesel spilled or leaked. Clean up is far more complicated than lighting a match.


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## breezynosacek (Nov 7, 2003)

gobug said:


> I'm not certain, but I think sweat bees are solitary - no nests or hives. It sounds like your bees are yellow jackets, as guessed already.
> 
> I really like the inverted glass bowl idea - no pesticide at all. Just don't do this if the nest is in the ground against the house.
> 
> ...


Gobug, you just gave me a really great idea on buggers that build their nests in the ground. There are wasps and some of the larger stingers that build nests in the ground and using your idea of the pop bottle....

What IF you took one of those bug bombs (fogger) and set it off under one of those? Of course, you'd have to be really careful not to get it in your face and if they are the kind that create an extra exit you wouldn't want to be outside when they came out the other end but it might just kill the whole nest with a bug bomb like that.

I tend to agree, I don't like the idea of pouring fuels into the soil. Some guy told us to use kerosene down our toilet to keep the drains from freezing or some such. I don't want it in my ground water.


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## tallpaul (Sep 5, 2004)

I have had great results with "seven" dust applied liberally at the entrance. The bee's ,yellow jacketts whatever take the dust back into the nest as they walk through it and it wipes them out pretty good. I first tried this when I had kept spraying a spot on my house with liquids and had no luck and have used it several times since for different nests.


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## cowboy joe (Sep 14, 2003)

Are these the same as 'sod' bees? I've come across a half dozen or so ground nests this year. Only close encounters of the first & second kind fortunately...had a close encounter of the third kind two years back and won't forget that for a long while.


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## Ladyhen (Aug 28, 2004)

I found a yellow jacket trap at our hardware store. It is working WELL and is environmentally friendly.

It is a cylinder shape and has one opening on each side with a kind of bridge in between. On the bridge, you place a high protein "bait" - cat food, tuna, etc. In the botton of the cylinder, you put 1 cup of apple juice with a few drops of dish soap. There's a lid on the cylinder. The yellow jackets fly in to get the bait, then are trapped by the lid and end up drowning in the apple juice. By the time we dump it each evening, it's about an inch thick with dead yellow jackets!

I think you could easily improvise with a two liter bottle.


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## gobug (Dec 10, 2003)

First of all, the bottle was someone else's idea, it's in another post,and I don't remember whose idea it really was since I'm in this posting. It is a great idea.

As for setting off a bomb, it isn't needed. A bomb is a total release aerosol. It's way more chemical than you need. Ground nests are easy to exterminate because there is usually one door, and all you have to do is get an aerosol with some vapor pressure and a tiny straw applicator (not wasp and hornet spray which is mostly liquid with very little vapor pressure). One or two seconds of spray is all that is needed if you get it right in the opening. (that's what the little straw does)

The eloquence of the bowl is that NO chemical is needed. The bottle is a great idea because it isolates the pesticide and also minimizes the amount. To use the bomb and the bowl together isn't such a good idea. 

Traps can actually make the wasp problem worse by increasing the number of workers around the trap at all times. The best time to use them is in the spring when the queens are doing the food collecting. Every queen you trap eliminates a colony. This time of year, the queens can't fly and are laying around a hundred eggs a day. The traps only harvest some worker wasps. These traps really upset me because people who are allergic think they are safer, when in reality the risk is greater. This information is hidden in the instructions for the trap. I tell customers to hang the traps by the neighbor they don't like.

I like dusts, because there is something left for workers who return home. This is often needed on nests that cannot be removed. That said, dusts are the highest risk formulations of pesticides. The concentration is higher than other formulations, and the product hangs in the air if it is moving. Sometimes it's even hard to open the container without some risk of exposure. In addition, Sevin is an organophosphate, which means it inhibits cholenesterase. Cholenesterase is the chemical that allows nerve pulse transmission. Organophosphates build up in your body and you cannot metabolize or eliminate them. I like to use a dust that is a combination of DE and pyrethrin. It is still more concentrated than sprays, but your body will process it and a quarter teaspoon is enough to exterminate the whole nest.


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## fin29 (Jun 4, 2003)

I think the original post was about bees, not wasps, and I'm having the same problem right now. One of those suckers chased me down for about 500 feet this weekend, unprovoked, managed to get up into my shirt while I was sprinting to get away from it, and stung me on the back. What was it? A cute little furry bumble bee that had taken up residence in the ground with about 5,000 of his buddies under my swing set. One of my kids, my husband, and two house guests have been stung as well, and none of us were within 100 feet of the nest when we were attacked.

I called my county extension service. They said that there is usually only one entrance to the hive when you're dealing with bees. In the evening, shoot a can of bee-approved Raid into the hole and cover the hole with a clear plastic or glass bowl. The bowl both traps the bees in the poisoned nest and keeps any stragglers that didn't make it in there by nightfall from returning to recolonize the nest. I might put a ring of Sevin around the entrance as well for good measure. I absolutely abhor pesticides, but not as much as I hate being chased down and attacked by bees, especially with two toddlers.


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## bergere (May 11, 2002)

Jack we get them here too,, and boy are they mean.

The best way to get rid of them, is Chickens. As long as I have chickens running around, I do not get ground bees or yellow jackets.
Have seen our hens stand next to the nest,, and snap them up coming and going.
Never did understand how they could stand next to the nest and not get stung/bit.


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