Yellow Jacket attack!

8/19/07

Hi Everyone,



Wow, what an interesting weekend. On the advice from several people I made home made yellow jacket traps and put those out on Saturday. Not a single yellow jacket had been caught so far, perhaps my home made trap is not very appealing to the yellow jackets for some reason.



On Sunday the weather was nice so I came out to watch my hive for a while and was amazed. I got to watch the yellow jackets and bees fighting in front of me. I would see things like yellow jackets coming kind of near the hive, then a bee would come out and attack it and they would fall on the ground rolling around as they fought. Sometimes I would see a second and even a third yellow jacket join the fight. I also saw the bees forming a semi-circle in front of the entrance to the hive as a way to protect it better. It was really kind of amazing, but also alarming to see the yellow jackets so aggressively attacking the bees.



I went out and bought one of those commercial yellow jacket traps and in an hour it had already caught 8 yellow jackets. I think I'll pick up a couple more and put them in place as well.

We'll see how that goes.