AMAZING Yellow Jackets Ground Nest Removal

hey guys thanks so much for tuning in to check out this video this is going to be a removal of an Eastern Yellow Jacket nest which is a nest in the ground I'm really excited about this video this nest is humongous it actually inspired me to do a upcoming video which I'm currently working on showing how much soil is excavated from these nests by measuring the volume of empty space in the nest I just recently extricated so I'm gonna be showing you guys how much soil is actually removed in a season from a particular species in this one being an Eastern Yellow Jacket nest really excited to show you guys that that footage so far it's pretty incredible even for me knowing how much that they're actually removing it's gonna be really cool to convey that on camera and show you guys what that looks like so let's get to it I want to show you guys this removal and I'll catch you guys at the end so I just wanted to do a couple close-up shots and just kind of show you guys what the area looked like how it's pretty much been all summer so this is really tall grass and they were kind of like burrowing in between the tall weeds and everything and down inside of there is where the entranceway to the nest is so you can kind of see they were carrying out little pebbles and things and dropping him off right outside the entrance way and they were pretty well protected with all those weeds there so skunks didn't know they were there possums and raccoons I was able to get us some good shots with the crane to the crane to is the device that I use to hold my camera so that way it makes for nice smooth shots just batten down the area with my lawnmower with my lawsuit on which I'm sure looks pretty silly to onlookers so I really did expect this to kind of swarm up a little bit more than what it did they as it turns out once I start digging up the nest they the nest itself is about four inches down from the surface of the ground so the vibration itself didn't really set them off as much as the activity rate the entranceway so when people know grass and they get stung by Yellowjackets oftentimes it's not from the first pass that they make it's from the second pass when they come back to that area after the swarm had already happened so you can kind of see here they started to swarm the area just and it was more related to the fact that the atmosphere around the entranceway has changed so the all the foliage and paraphernalia had changed around that area and so foragers coming back and things were a little confused as to where their entranceway was because they didn't have their land markers to really kind of tell them where everything was they were kind more just floating around I mean it was a there was probably about 50 of them floating around they're not super attacking me until I turned the vacuum on then they really started going after the vacuum and you can kind of see them to the right hand side here they were going around the vacuum and whatnot but towards the end of this removeable they were swarming pretty heavy so you can see this one here in the bottom left part of the hole has a bit of dirt in its mouth or soil from excavating and and she goes but uh yeah so this is a very very very active nest and just by showing some of these shots here now you'll notice to the right of the hole when they come out and they're not flying out they're crawling they're not getting sucked up by the vacuum because I'm not sucking them off the surface I am literally just vacuuming them as they fly so if they're crawling out I'm the vacuum has no chance of sucking them up so a lot of the swarm that happens is more just from the adults who climb out and kind of client for me to crawl across the surface of the ground and get away so the reason why they even do that is is they're they're climbing out and going towards the Sun if the nozzle is on the other side I probably would have gotten a heck of a lot more of them because they would have pretty much gone right into the vacuum but that would have ruined the shot in the sense that you wouldn't be getting this super clear and bright shot of the entranceway of the hole which that's a small price to pay have a little bit of a swarm but have a great shot so when I cut down to probably about five minutes of them climbing out of this hole and just seeing that the mass amount of Yellow Jacket what I call the Warriors but the the guards and the foragers that are coming up to the entrance way to protect the nest it still it's just a fraction of what was actually inside the nest all together see it was about five minutes that I lift left in the video but I was doing this for about probably half hour too so 40 minutes just to give a a great idea for everybody to see just how much activity there was so patent on the ground just trying to stir them up and that worked like a charm because out they came when you pat on the ground like that and no fear I mean these things just when they come out to attack they only have one thing in their mind is protecting and defending the colony so I did kind of spray like my ankles and my wrists with black flag prior to starting and they can smell that they shouldn't be flying on that but they just go right into attack mode and they could be stinging my suit latched onto my suit and I can spray them directly with the black flag and they will not stop and they will you know if you spray them while they're in the air they will fall to the ground spaz out a bit because they're getting killed but if they're on my suit they don't spaz at all they stay in that stinging position and continue to sting until they die so I'll actually find dead bodies in the stinging position latched on my suit just look at all those numbers I mean that just blows me away and once you think it's starting to slow down then thousands more come for and out of the hole I was really happy with these shots I just thought that that just looks so good seeing all them flying out like that and at the end of this video I include a little slow mo reel of this as I do my outro so you guys can see what that's like in a con more of a slow motion these cameras are 4k but they're shooting in 29.9 frames a second so doing slo-mo shots you can you get an idea as to clarity and things with the slow motion but it's not the same as if like my other camera that's 1080p that shoots and slow motion has 60 frames a second and you get a lot better clarity per frame so with this one I'm satisfied with with the way the slow motion looks I could slow it down further but you're gonna get a lot more blurred images than if you had a higher frame rate so but the quality of the standard time footage is paramount for me so I accept that small compromise of slightly blurred images with the slow motion so the name of the game here is storing them up the whole point is to get as many out of the whole and out of the nest as I can so that way when I'm extracting the nests itself it's not completely engulfed with with adults so there's about five different list levels here there's the foragers they're out out and about outside the nests that are coming back there's the guards at the entranceway there's the Queen and the tenders to the larvae inside the nest and then there's the excavators that are underneath the nest digging and pulling out material so the foragers go out and they get the pulp to build the envelope and the comb they also will get the food for the larvae the tenders to the larvae will go around and swap fluid so as the foragers bring in food the tenders will then divvy out the food to the larvae the Queen lays eggs she doesn't really do much with tendering tending to the larvae anymore and then excavators slowly go down and dig and haul out soil and then bring back cellulose this is kind of a twofer job so you can kind of get a good idea good or good image here of swarm around me you can see some latching onto my arms at one point here one lands the light back and starts ticking my back not sure if it's in this particular shot I thought it was I guess not oh there it goes and just a few more shots showing the entranceway here it started to slow down a little bit but even slowing down was still like you know 30 or 40 within a you know 20 second time I mean it's still incredible the numbers that will come out of there what this also does to vacuuming up as many of the of the guards and things that I can is that when foragers come back they don't get hit with that pheromone response they will float around just out of curiosity as to why things have changed as far as like the landscape and why I'm there but they're not really an attack mode they're just more curious if there were still guards there they'd be setting on constantly setting off the pheromone response and the forgers immediately coming back would immediately go into attack mode so my vacuum is pretty invaluable when it comes to doing these ground nests because I don't only use it just to suck up the wasps I also use it as a way to clear away soil as I'm pulling out big chunks you know the soil falls down on top of the nest and the easiest and quickest way to get it off the nest it's just a vacuum it right up so inside my canister my vacuum oftentimes you guys have probably noticed who have seen my videos before have ground nests you'll notice that there's a good amount of sludge and mud inside the vacuum when I'm done and that's solely to do with vacuuming up all the soil as I'm doing the removal itself for those of you who have not seen my videos before this your first time being here inside my vacuum is a mixture of usually dish soap but pretty much any kind of soap mixed with water just a couple drops soap and about maybe a gallon maybe half down to a gallon worth of water and so as the adults are sucked up they they go into that the end of that little mixture and they die pretty quick and so when I go to heaven T out to vacuum at the end I'm not emptying out a vacuum full of angry wasps night being out pretty much just sludgy corpses so there hasn't been much rain over the course of this summer so the soil was very very hard and dry so it really didn't take much digging with a shovel just took more of me just grabbing the edges of it just pulling it pulling big chunks out so you start to see the the enormity of this nest and the ground and how they're constructed is the it starts out as one rodent hole like one Bowl hole or something and over the course of the time that the Queen new queen founds the nest or founds that hole she starts building it a nest and she'll start excavating out the soil a little bit she starts building the the comb trucked laying eggs but then as her workers start hatching then they start digging so this hole that you're seeing here which is about 12 inches wide it right here at the top or at the crest and then about nine inches across the other way was dug out solely by the wasps that cavity didn't just exist there in the ground like they dug that out they excavated all that soil so then as they dig out this massive hole they build envelope around the new cone so they're constantly tearing down their own nest and rebuilding and digging all the exact same time so as some workers are excavating other work that you're building and they just keep that process going and it's a super efficient system and construction crews should take note so what you're seeing here this this dome-like shape is the envelope on top of the comb so that envelope encompasses the entire nest from top to bottom 360 degrees around the thing so when I go to pull them out I mean I would love to pull out the nest all in one piece and have that one big conical nest however with this species the envelope is super super brittle you just pick it up with your fingers and it crumbles and your fingers so it's more of like a just a a encompassing protection of the dropping soil and everything else but and you kind of notice around the edges of the of the envelope see like there where my left hand is you see that there's a gap there it's about maybe a quarter inch to a 3/8 inch gap between the envelope and the soil wall so there is a little bit of an air gap you can get this nest so they dig out more than they need and they just keep doing that so the nest gets built further further out but there's always that space there though this envelope is never touching the side of the soil just a few more little vacuuming x' to try to get up whatever workers might be left inside the the ones but primarily the ones you're seeing there are newly hatched adults kind of having a little bit of a haze to them almost looks black see and a lot more black than yellow and those ones are one-sided just hatched they don't fly they can sting if you try to pick them up but they really they really are trying to get away from you more than anything so once I get majority of the adults that I can there's they're still gonna be hundreds of them inside that nest but uh try to get as many of the workers as I can check out that monster I mean that it's just a humongous nest that is seven tiers of cone and that's all Queen so that you can see they're all these larger cells just get another angle at the same part of the removal look at that thing that thing was almost ten pounds I mean it was it was pretty pretty hefty so it's about the about the length of a football but it's but it's wider in areas than a football and yeah just just a monster [Music] so I do get to share that up course a little bit later in this video of just examining the mast examining the cells and look at all these adults in there that's just incredible so again just trying to vacuum off just as many of the mature adults as I can because I'm gonna be putting this in in one of my bins and I was gonna be doing shots of it later and I really didn't want to have mature adults flying out of that thing when I take this down into my quote-unquote studio to do my shots later so spending a few extra moments just vacuuming up what I can is paramount not having a mess lately so this is down at the base of the envelope wall that was the comb was resting on look how perfect that is see this hole to the left here I tell the ones who are digging the excavators get in to the nest from down below there they go there's a couple of them there's two holes they're excited to see all the stones down there so I've never actually gotten a envelope of bass out of a ground nest like this in one piece until doing this nest I could not believe I got that out in one solid piece because like I said this stuff is usually served brittle down to these ground nests that usually just falls apart when you're trying to grab it cuz it's connected to stones and whatever look at that got that all out in one piece and I still have it in one piece I want to try to cast it it may be an amazing cast that or at least spray it with some poli to try to harden it up a little bit and stiffen it up so just try to give you guys an idea as to how deep and how wide this cavity is get some close-up that using the crane to cavity it's just freaking humongous here's my hand inside of it that's me touching the bottom all this distance here's where then I started that's at least eight inches down is my middle finger and my pinky to my thumb is eight inches it's well over eight and this is wide it's like got a foot this way and about eight inches this way eight nine inches it's crazy that's all ready to get thrown into the compost pile alright so that was a pretty frickin big nest which is like this time of year this type of nest is just at its peak and there they have built this massive colony Kingdom under the ground and when you see that little hole and you know some people suggest about pouring gas down it and things they don't realize what's under there they don't bother digging it up afterwards but it's a pretty incredible feat what they accomplished in probably about 4 to 5 months so this is the envelope it was at the very bottom of the comb as you can see see that hole there my eye that's where they were entering the space in the cavity to dig down further so here's where the actual cone was sitting and then they were coming out of the coma space and through this hole or out through this hole into the ground - then excavate then once they excavated they come back up and go through that hole and then go out the hole and at the surface of the ground there's a couple of them there's one there and there's a there's a couple on this side you can see that right there so yeah so this is pretty incredible just with it itself I can't believe I got it out pretty much in one piece all but right at the bottom of the vacuum sucked up a little bit so but yeah really excited I got that out in one piece I'm gonna try to show you guys the comb itself this could be kind of interesting considering I'm inside in my studio and I'm bringing in a live Yellow Jackets nest that I did have it sitting outside this evening which got pretty cool it's about 50 degrees cold enough to slow them down but not stop them there's a fly in here it keeps throw she's throwing me off you guys fly can you fly didn't seem so this could be the end of me [Music] so this is it and this is heavy this is like probably 10 pounds it's decent size it's got about seven layers so just get a couple extra shots here using the crane to just try to get some close up to the cone so as you can see I'm trying to update my production a little bit and you see my drop cloth behind me it's not quite ironed out I just wanted to get some shots really quick I do plan on ironing out and you guys are sure go to comment about it but just look how super super cool these caromar so there's three layers of Queen comb this is one of the layers here you can see a larva their queen larva or male larva weaving her cotton her silk cap that's what the white caps are the white caps are larvae that weave their cap and get ready to go through the pre patient stage so there's a worker cells on this third comb down and then also Queen cells I've never actually seen that before I've never seen Queen cells attached to worker cells like that I've usually just see the Queen cells on top of work ourselves so there's virtually two and a half or two and third Queen cells on the top of this comb so there's our all work ourselves and then to the right hand top or queen cells see the difference in size I was really happy with how these shots turned out and no stings with this removal so that was even more exciting so so you can see there where my my backdrop is needs to be ironed out it was brand new I opened it out of the packaging and hung it up well I should ironed it but bear with me while I update my production so as you can see I'm stepping up production a little bit I'm trying to make my videos a little bit more pleasing to viewers who were maybe used to channels who have a little bit more production value my channel has started out mainly just from me holding a cell phone and doing removal videos for friends on Facebook and Anna decided to start posting them on YouTube and then things just started taking off and you guys started joining in and subscribing to my channel which is really awesome and it's happened so fast that now I'm at a certain point with my subscriber count and my viewership that I've surpassed people who have fewer subscribers but have a greater production with equipment and with just techniques and things with editing that I just don't have yet and I kind of feel like I've kind of getting thrown into the deep end so I'm trying to improve my quality improve my production improve my shots improve my editing so that way you guys have something a little bit more pleasing and something a little more conducive with a channel that has this much notoriety to it so bear with me as I start to work on some things if there's some suggestions you guys might have drop them in the comments because I'd love to hear them I'm very much open to suggestions so if you guys have any ideas please feel free to drop them in the comments I spend a lot of time in the comments especially when I post a new video I try to spend about two hours just answering questions just engaging my audience so that way you guys know that I'm here for you just as much as you guys are obviously here for me so I kinda want it to be a bit of a give-and-take so hopefully you guys feel that with my videos and with my channel alright guys thanks so much for tuning in and check out this video if you guys enjoyed this drop in the comments let me know what you think if you have any ideas for any future videos just drop in the comments let me know what you guys like to see next if you guys haven't subscribed already please consider doing so and then if you do end up subscribing hit the bail notification button so that way you guys can get notified anytime that I do post a video if you guys have subscribed already and you've been coming back and enjoying my videos thanks so much for tuning in and supporting my channel and I'll catch you guys on the next video [Music]

Channel: Hornet King

Views: 1,822,046

Rating: 4.870399 out of 5

Keywords: Yellow Jackets Nest, Wasp Nest Removal, Ground Nest, Wasp, Yellow Jackets, Nest, Yellow Jackets In the Ground, Hornets, Ground Hornets, Ground Wasp, Ground Bees, Honeycomb

Id: cMrwlSh81AU

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Gawkman]

19:36 when he scoops up 2 handfuls of dead wasps... is there a word for fascinated and horrified at the same time?

[u/Articulated]

A fly landed on my arm while watching this...fucking shit myself.

[u/HORNETKING-YouTube]

Thank you so much for sharing my video and promoting my channel. Anyone who enjoys this video, please check out my YouTube channel, Hornet King !

[u/BennyInThe18thArea]

Thanks, wasn’t aware wasps can have underground nests...one more thing to worry about when going outside.

[u/[deleted]]

Man wasps would be so much cooler if they could make honey. It would at least make their asshole behaviour tolerable.

[u/BabyImNoDrinkingMan]

This guy is really passionate about wasp removal! Great stuff.

[u/CptnLarsMcGillicutty]

he must have gotten the queen at some point. i was hoping it would be towards the end like some final boss shit but he probably got her randomly at some point midway through and theres no way of knowing

[u/Mr_Jensen]

I love when these kind of videos pop up. They barely ever make it to the top though, wish they had more... buzz.

[u/senorbozz]

Awesome! I did pest control here in Florida about 10 years ago and I pulled this beauty out of the ground. Not quite as big as the one he did, but I did mine without the protective gear. I went early in the morning and hosed the entire area down before removing it. Didn't get stung, but it was pretty stressful.

https://imgur.com/v6td0e8