MASSIVE INFESTATION! Thousands Of Wasps above Basement Ceiling! Whats In YOUR House??

i'm the hornet king and i remove incredible and insane wasp nests [Applause] [Music] whether their nests are underground in a house in a tree or even down a well i'm the person crazy enough to extract them and i do so with my trusty vacuum in this video i'll be removing a massive yellow jacket colony that decided to make its nest above the ceiling in a client's basement check it out hey everyone welcome to the horne king channel so this was a yellowjacket colony vespula germanica which is also known as a german yellowjacket species and anyone who's ever been here to my channel knows that german yellowjackets make some of the larger nests of the yellow jacket species that i take care of look at the size of this thing this thing was bigger than a basketball it was like it was maybe 20 inches in diameter and about 14 inches wide in some spots but for the most part it was just absolutely huge and this client was noticing in and out activity from outside right above where their brick met the overhang of their house this is a bi-level house so in between these joists on either side was this massive nest now you can see there's foam insulation around it so they even got through the foaming insulation to find their way into the space now you will notice that there are a lot of males around here right here on this shot you can see males on the side of the nest and they're the ones with the longer antennae and they're kind of just walking slowly they're not aggressive so this was already a reproductive nest so there may have been queens that had already made it with males and had left for the season to go and start their own colony for next year often people ask me like okay well what is it about a season like is it like fall is it summer no a season only refers to the life cycle of that particular hive so a wasp season can start at the beginning of spring and last all the way till the end of fall or early winter for some species and german yellow jackets is one of those they will continue to thrive well into early winter time at least as far as i've seen and even some of my clients will call me in the dead of winter saying that they're starting to see emerging queens coming out if they had a nest in the middle of their walls or something and they didn't have it removed the new queens will actually hunker down inside the wall space until springtime or what they think is springtime and most of the time it's when someone like lights up a wood stove or something and the wasps start to re-emerge out of the house thinking it's it's springtime so to start looking for a new place to build a nest and that's usually when i start getting calls in the dead of winter is when people warm up a room that normally doesn't get very warm or what have you and those queens wake up and think oh it's time for me to go build a nest so you can see with this particular nest there were several very large um queen cell comb and the bottom three tiers that you see here are all queen cells now it's not to say that every single cell in that cone are queen cells but they're the ones you can see here are definitely queen cells and you can compare them to the fourth layer up is very small and the one below it are very large oftentimes you'll have workers start to build regular cell worker cell comb and then they'll build the queen comb on the outer perimeter of that same cone so it's kind of hard to say definitively that all three of those comb layers were queen cells but there was definitely clean salt on them at least on that third one up so as with any of my removals i have to vacuum up very gingerly i don't want to shake this nest too much but i can remove off a lot of the envelope without disturbing the nest and causing more of a swarm there were tons in here i mean there were just there was probably about 2 000 to 200 somewhere in there not the largest colony size as far as numbers are concerned for this particular species but 2200 is nothing to sneeze at i mean that is a lot you see i just actually hit that larva there well i was actually a few painting adult and it kind of popped it and it dropped out which is kind of gross but pay attention to that spot because in the next shot you'll see an adult wasp pulling that that damaged pupating adult out of the cell and kind of dangling it like it's about to drop this is the problem about my vacuum is that it's the hose sometimes pops off but no big deal just jump down and put to reattach it now look this one wasp here is grabbing onto a pupating adult and i'm about to vacuum it up and she's pulling it out of the cell and then she goes so they are already like even they notice that the nest is under a siege so they start trying to repair certain things they start trying to pull out some of the dead larvae but once the main guards are removed from the colony they're no longer trying to attack as much they're just like confused so german yellow jackets that's why they're they're one of my favorite nests to remove because they're not like 100 always aggressive so when i'm removing them i don't have to worry about them trying to like get in my veil or anything they mainly just kind of dive bomb they float around and then um that's pretty much it but like squamosa the kilofront or southern yellow jackets and eastern yellowjackets they will just latch on and relentlessly try to sting and attack until i'm either out of there or they're gone in general so with german yellow jackets it's a matter of just kind of just taking my time and just slowly methodically taking down the nest so here i had detached it from the floor above and i'm about to pull it out not able to get the greatest shot because i was using the phone screen as my eyes up inside that cavity because i could not stick my head up in that in that ceiling space so i had to use the phone as my as my my eyes while i was doing the actual removal so that's why sometimes it looks like i'm not actually hitting the envelope at certain points with the nozzle the vacuum because i couldn't see it so i pretty much had my face like pressed up against the ceiling trying to look at the screen of my phone so i just kind of have to cut a little bit bigger of a hole to get this nest out now some people ask well why damage more drywall if you don't have to if you can just uh cut up the comb but there are a lot of adults in between the layers of comb and to cut the comb apart you're just releasing all those adults to fly around and that's more adults i have to suck up in the vacuum if i can keep the nest in one piece most of them stay in between the layers and i can pull everybody down at once and put them all into the bin at the same time but just look at the size of this thing i mean this thing is huge so the size of the nest is encompassing the envelope as well not just the cone so when i remove the cone people saying oh that's not a very big nest because they just see the comb size but this is a massive nest i mean this not only is large and including the envelope but the comb itself is huge i mean look at that thing that is massive look at all the different like all the different uh queen cells on there and you can see they're kind of just floating around they're not like latched all over me like you would see with southern yellow jackets or eastern yellow jackets and it was too big for my bin so i had to go up and get a bigger bin out of my car and bring that down to put it in there but that just gives you a little bit of a reference about how big it is so just sucking up a few of the ones off the surface of the envelope are off the surface of the cone because there are ones that are flying around the room and they're going to come back to the comb so if i just use this as a magnet and then they'll fly down to it and check it out and then i'll vacuum up off the surface while i go up and get the uh the bin so i'm heading up to get the bin now and i'll come down and put it in there and allowing this to attract some more adults while i'm up there getting that so one bin's way too small the other one's way too big but this is just the sizes that i had so gently place it down into this bin because i don't want to disturb the colony uh not that i have to worry about them flying around too much now because now they're in the bin but you just don't want to just rip the thing up and accidentally tear off a layer of comb or something so just having to check inside here now there's obviously a lot of envelopes still inside and there's a lot of adults inside there so they're still coming back from foraging and coming into the space and being like okay wtf where did everybody go so leaving a bit of envelope in there is definitely helpful to get up the rest of the foragers that are coming back so most of my videos around like 10 minutes to 15 minutes but these removals take me about an hour hour and a half and two hours depending on how involved it gets um in-house removals are always the longer of the removals i do ground nests um are the second to longest and aerial nest building yellow jackets are pretty much always the shortest uh aerial nest building yellow jackets everything is right there it's everything's exposed you don't have to worry about finding the nest but when it comes to an indwelling species like this one or an in-cavity species it takes a while to find them and it also takes a while to uh to extract the nest gingerly so you're not causing mayhem inside of the wall space or ceiling space or whatever so pulling down the envelope all in one piece does the same thing that pulling down the comb in one piece does is it traps the adults that are on it it keeps them from fleeing that spot and you know vacating into the ceiling space or into the room so we know even though the hole hole's a little bit bigger it's still hard to see up inside there still had to rely on my phone so this is what i do to temporarily just uh seal up the hole so that way the customers aren't seeing adults inside is just to tape it up with some really heavy duct tape all right so this is after i get the nest home and opening up the bin you can see there's a lot still flying around inside of there and these are ones that had either they were foragers that came back they were on the envelope or they were ones that just between the layers and now have the ability to fly because you know as adults hatch they have to wait about two days before they can fly so this takes a little bit of time for them so if they finally emerge and are able to fly they'll kind of like explore the area inside that bin so when i open it up that's the first time they're seeing daylight now you have to remember that these species built these nests 100 in the dark there is no light inside that cavity space so all of this nest was built in the dark they did that 100 by their sense and their ability to feel it with their antennae all those cells all those holes all those comb all that envelope was 100 built in the dark doesn't that just blow your mind i mean that blows my mind it's absolutely incredible so you'll see here there are a lot of queens and males inside these different layers remember when i said about how that the queen cell were on the outside of worker cells on the inside this is a perfect example of that cone so the inner circle of this comb is worker cell but then the outer layer all the white silk caps are are queen cells so there was a heck of a lot of queen cells in this nest there was going to be probably several hundred if not about 500 to 800 um new queens leaving this nest to mate and start a new colony using my handy dandy pry bar and just prying these different comb apart and that makes it a lot easier for me to to not like just like rip it and have larvae going all over the place because if i rip the comb it's going to rip cells in half and then larva can be falling all over the table i kind of want to keep everything condensed inside the comb for until i go to feed it to my animals but you see all these adults here again a lot of these are new males and new queens there's not a heck of a lot of workers in there so even if uh you can see there's some kind of flying at me and flying around like curious those are the workers those are the guards um those are the ones that will be doing the attacking the queens and males if they fly away they're not flying around me they're not continuing to like circle they're leaving they are getting out of dodge um so any ones that you see kind of hovering and floating and landing on the table things those are workers those are always 100 of the time workers scaredy cats are the males they're the ones that you see fly off uh they'll land on the table and then they'll scurry underneath the comb or they'll like they'll wander around in circles they don't know what to do with themselves because they just free loaders there's the queen there on the right hand side she just went underneath the comb boom people always ask to see what's inside my vacuum and i don't always show that because i've shown it so many times on this channel it literally just looks like a pile of sludge inside my back and there's really nothing like distinguishable or interesting about it if you want to see that check some of my older videos but in 2021 i'll try to show that some more so people can see the it literally looks like wet paper mache inside the vacuum like it's featureless there's nothing really to see but there are some videos in 2019 and early 2020 that i was like picking up the contents from inside the vacuum with my bare hands and showing them to the camera so if you're interested in that you can check those videos out with being a nest with this many uh comb layers it does take a little bit longer to have to separate them and uh i usually kind of wait maybe like two days before i actually start to take apart one particular nest because then i can get a few nests at one time and then take them all apart at the same time so usually when i'm doing this in 2020 i was probably taking apart maybe 10 nests at a time there's the queen there yeah she is massive and that is the queen that's queen mother that's not a new queen that's that is the queen you can tell because she's more robust she's got more of a golden hue on her on the sides of her and the underside of her abdomen but in the vacuum she goes just getting the last few layers of comb apart make sure i get all the adults out of there i don't want any adults to be inside the comb if i can help it because i don't want my chickens to be first of all they won't really get stung especially from german yellow jackets but this is just good practice for even the more aggressive species to make sure that i get most of the adults if not all of them because i don't want my girls getting stung but usually what happens is if they see a lot of the uh they see a lot of adults climbing around on the comb they won't eat it because they'll kind of want to wait till they scurry away so just vacuuming up the rest of the envelope here which is really cool i i like i like doing this it's very satisfying to sit here and just let it chop up into the nozzle and sometimes i'll like take my both of my hands like i hold the nozzle between my legs and then just like take both of my hands and like and just like crumple all the envelope up into the nozzle having to suck up in like seconds but doing the uh the one-handed job always works too i don't know why that's so satisfying to watch but it just is what it is we don't question it do we so those are the ones you see in there males and queens there's quite a few big larger wasps there and also obviously the ones with the longer antennas which are which are the males so even after i do one vacuum over i have to take each one of the layers of comb and do a second vacuum over because the ones that are swarming around sometimes land on them like that one and climb around on underneath the uh the different layers so i just go one by one before i put them back into the bin here's a few landed there and the ones flying around are not going to start new colonies like i said they're workers they will die probably in a day or so so they're probably one of the luckier ones come out of these removals because they get a few more minutes of survival time and then bringing all the nests like i said i do about 10 nests at a time bringing all those nuts up here for my girls after removing the yellow jackets and the hornets or whatever the species are that i'm doing and dump them out for the girls to come up so you can see the pigeon was malting at this point she's all she looks terrible but she still bought she's still bossy chicken she bosses around the younger girls henny and giblet there's daisy here at the bottom and of course the turkey which her name is goosey people always ask what the turkey's name is i call her turkey just as a nickname but her real name is goosey gobble gobble all right everyone thank you so much for tuning in to check out this video as most of you know i started a twitch channel and i've been live streaming on twitch pretty much every night since i started it back on sunday and i had such a good time for the last few nights that i've been streaming live folks were coming in and just chatting and just hanging out it's been so much fun getting to know you guys um special thank you to cynthia statton lynn lutz uh star irma lead us all some of these folks that have been coming in and joining the stream pretty much every night crafty um i can't remember quite everybody off the top of my head but i'm just so excited that you folks come in pretty much every stream and at least just say hey and that just means a lot to me that you folks are coming in and supporting the channel and helping grow the community on a separate platform other than just youtube i'm getting a lot of questions on some of my comments and things about why not use youtube for live streaming and instead of using twitch the problem is about youtube doing the live streaming is that the algorithm doesn't distinguish the difference between live streaming and produced content like what you're watching right now so it'll lower my ranking in the algorithm if i live stream to a lower audience than what i normally get with my produced videos well it's more logical that i'm gonna get a lower audience with streaming than i am with my produced content um the streaming isn't as searchable as say my produced content so the algorithm says oh you're streaming to less people less people are watching well we're gonna lower your your search ranking it's comparing apples to oranges so it's easier for me to live stream on a platform like twitch which is made for live streaming rather than dealing with the consequences of streaming live on youtube i don't expect anybody to download twitch specifically to watch me though there have been people who have done that and i'm very very grateful and thankful that you guys have decided to download twitch specifically to come to my stream all right everyone thank you so much tuning in to check out this video if you guys enjoyed this video drop in the comments let me know what you think if you have any suggestions for future videos or something like to see me cover an upcoming video or any ideas you'd like to see covered in an upcoming twitch stream also drop in the comments let me know already one thank you so much for tuning in to check out my videos supporting my channel and supporting my twitch stream and i'll catch you guys on the next [Music] video

Channel: Hornet King

Views: 198,807

Keywords: Hornet King, Hornets, Yellow jackets, Wasp nest removals, Bees, comb, Queens

Id: tDontUfXO_8

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021