Yellow Jackets Massive Underground Nest Removal | MACRO SHOTS HD |

[Music] she [Music] [Music] hey everyone thank you so much for tuning in to check out the hornet king channel this is the removal of an eastern yellowjacket colony that had made its nest underneath the stepping stone here at a client's house this was in philadelphia pennsylvania which is on the outer suburbs of philadelphia not quite in the city this particular colony was nested underneath the stepping stone and the client had actually gotten stung a couple times before noticing they were even there so when i arrived i just set up my vacuum and just start sucking up as many of the foragers workers and guards as i could pounding on top of the rock which kind of gets them all stirred up and starts letting them flood out from that entrance way to uh to investigate what the pounding was um so as they start coming out i start backing them up so you'll kind of notice that the um the ones that are crawling out that aren't flying out they're difficult to get vacuumed up and has nothing to do with the power of the vacuum as much as it has to do with the fact that they have hooked feet and his hook feet can pretty much latch onto any surface even as smooth as you might think it is and on the microscopic level these surfaces aren't all that smooth so their feet are able to hook on there and really take hold when i vacuum up i i try to get the ones flying so that's why i pound the moral on the stones that way it gets them flying and stirred up and then when they fly out in mid-air they get sucked up into the vacuum but the ones that are crawling i have to sit there and constantly swipe my vacuum nozzle back and forth and back and forth so in this particular colony there's probably about i don't know maybe a thousand to 1500 adults inside it was a good sized colony and that's including larva pupating adults the queen hatched queens workers guards males all of them and includes everybody so once i pick up the rock i was able to locate the nest pretty easily often times underneath these flat rocks moles and voles will dig tunnels that go directly underneath of the the rock surface and that will allow for uh for for to be like an exposed top half of the tunnel almost like a half pipe so it's probably what this an original queen when she founded this area that's probably what she probably attached the top of her nest to that rock and then as the colony built bigger and bigger and bigger they just kind of expanded out the soil around that original tunnel and now you can't even see the tunnel anymore so i just try to dig up as much as i can um excavating out around the colony um and around the nest and try not to disturb it all too much because the more i disturb it the more that are going to come out unnecessarily so if i can keep them inside the layers of comb for long as possible that's less i have to vacuum up or that's less of a chance that they're going to swarm all around me the more that swarm the longer i have to stay there vacuuming up adults so i can try to be as gentle as possible if that means take a little bit more time vacuuming and digging up the actual nest that's what i do so i was able to get a couple good angles of this removal oftentimes when i do my ground nest the the camera's kind of on like a 30 degree angle from where the nest is but this time i was able to get the camera just above it so that way you can see how much gap there is around the nest so when they're building they don't build the envelope directly to the inside wall of the of the hole they actually leave a little bit of a gap in between and that's so they can climb on the outside and build more envelope and will also be able to climb out on the outside and dig more soil out so there's always a good amount of probably about a half inch three-eighths to a half inch of gap around the nest so as the workers dig and they dig out the cavity for the nest to be built into any rocks that are in there they're not able to dig out so they kind of just dig around them and chew the soil off of the stones and then carry that dirt out and then the rocks themselves drop to the bottom of the hole so oftentimes when i'm done after i pull the nest out you'll see a collection of stones at the bottom and that's where like the canoe queens and the males kind of hide underneath all that uh hide underneath all those pebbles and things so this is a good sized nest this had a lot of new queen cells in it most of the top ones you see there the two comb patties are all queen cells so all those silk caps are going to become new queens which is pretty phenomenal because there was a lot of queens in this colony already you're looking between the layers you'll see the actual queen third third layer down you can see you're crawling there so i keep as many of the in between the cone layers as possible and put that in my rubbermaid bend and not worry about sucking them up once i get home so you see there's a lot of males at the bottom there you can tell the males because they have a longer ram horn like antenna females have the uh the straight shorter antennae and they kind of shoot straight out in front of them but the males there's kind of hook around i call it ram horns because they they kind of make that same shape so after sucking up some of the envelope you see how many are at the bottom underneath that envelope and most of those are males and there's some queens in there too there's one founding queen at the beginning of a season so all of this was started by one individual queen but then as the season progresses the workers start building more larger cell comb which become the queen cells so then when the queen lays eggs in there those ones those larva can grow bigger and demand more food and the more food they get the larger they get and then that's how they develop their reproductive system by being a larger larva being fed more nutrition so filling back in the hole the client actually gave me a bag of soil top soil that she had lying around so i was also able to fill that in with that careful when you're punching the inside of a hole like this there was a rock jutted out the side of that and i punched it right with my fist oh squarely squirrel crazy i got nothing for you squishy bill i got nothing for you squarely i will have some larvae soon no larvae yet this isn't a really good time humphrey i'm about to do some lost mess those very good [Music] so after i get the nest home try to vacuum up as many of the adults as i can i'm not too worried about ones that straggle and fly away it's not a big deal they're not going to hurt anything just go off and die um so i just kind of take my time try not to bang the the bin too much try not to jostle anything around because then all of them are going to come out all the exact same time and nobody needs that happening so once i get the nest out of the bin here i take my pry bar and i just separate the layers that came one piece at a time but again being gentle not to like flop the nest around or whatever eastern yellow jackets make a kind of more of a brittle type envelope so i just kind of take my vacuum nozzle and just kind of scrape it on the back of the comb and that stuff just breaks apart and it goes right up into the nozzle this is where a lot of the males and things like to hide so i try to get that vacuumed up as quick as i can separating the comb layer here you notice that there's not too many at this top layer these are just queen cap cells there's not too many of larva in there either so there's not really much reason for anybody to be hanging out up there so just a few few males really that i just had to vacuum up i love the noise that that makes when you back when you pry it open because then it's like crunches and carries on a lot of males in this nest there's a queen lots of meals holy cow spend a few more minutes here just vacuuming up the last few it's like that nice cluster down there there is a lot amount of queens at this bottom part of this comb there's a queen a lot of queens here so there would have been a lot of new colonies started from this particular colony if i hadn't removed it which i'm sure they're gonna start anyway around my house because as you can see some some queens are jumping off the table so i just let them go i'm not worried about queens i hope that they do start a nest nearby so i can film next year found the queen yet [Music] so i was able to get some super detailed macro shots using my video microscope of the wasps themselves so you're able to see all their body structures all the hair on their body how they breathe out of their abdomen their mouth parts their legs and their hooked feet and their wings plus shots of the comb and the envelope and how it's made plus some shots of the larva eating up close and personal the wasp that i was able to use was a european hornet queen a bald-faced hornet queen and a southern yellowjacket queen check it out i was really excited to share these macro images with you guys using my video microscope i'm able to show the vast intricacies of these creatures and just what makes them tick the abdomen here of the southern yellowjacket queen and seeing how it opens up at the end to allow for the avi positor to come out which is really bizarre because some of them just have a straight hole in the middle and this one you can see that it kind of opens up on the back side this is the wing of the southern yellow jacket queen it looks just like cellophane it's kind of like a bat wing made out of cellophane seeing the hair on the back of her head and the back of her thorax moving down to her shoulder and where her wing connects into her shoulder and seeing all the black vein you can see going through the cellophane-like material of her wing and that's not dirt on her wing that's just the color of it it's just the way it looks i always wonder why it had that little bit of a like a tannish look about it and it's because it has all this fleck inside of it there is some particulate on there but the main like tannish color like the goldish color hue that it has that's not from dirt that's just the way it looks [Music] so this is the back of a southern yellowjacket queen these are the distinct markings that i look for when i'm identifying a species and then the three little simple eyes on the back of her head along with the large almond-shaped eyes these are the mandibles and mouth parts of a bald-faced hornet delico vespula immaculata or an aerial nest building yellow jacket see the beads of water the tips of her hair on the front of her face [Music] her antennae and her compound eye look at all the little hexagonal shapes on her eye incredible detail it's so interesting to see these guys this close you see her hooked feet her mandibles and her mouth parts in behind the abdomen of the bald-faced hornet you see it's like telescopic and that's how they breathe those telescopic segments move in and out and that allows for air transfer in through her hobby positive port into her abdomen and all the little gold hairs that attach to the very ends of the telescopic segments of her abdomen see her hooked feet back legs back side of her mouth parts love this shot and you're able to see like her chest and how her legs connect in how she has like a reverse elbow coming from each one of her legs that way she can do this and touch her face with her legs these are the hooks feet that she has so when i say that the wasps have hooked feet they can attach to anything this is what they look like these two like talon looking things and they're very very hard it's exoskeletons not hair and they're able to grip surfaces with that and primarily their nest is so perforated these little hooks can kind of like hook into the perforations on the nest and they have like these little spurs like a little ways up from those tines and they're able to connect in even with those if their leg lays flat on the surface zooming in and out so you can see the different segments so this is the cellulose this is what the envelope looks like really really close up i don't know what time zoom this is i just had the video microscope really really close to the nest so you can see all the different fibers of the envelope and that shine is not wet that's that nest isn't wet and it's not an overly sharpened image that's the way it looked in the video it's the way it looked through the lens so when they mold that into a paste and make that envelope it almost like solidifies into like a cement it's really crazy so all those little strands you're seeing are individual cellulose strands that they pulled off of a piece of wood and every stripe is indicative of one wasp playing one strip at one time [Music] some close-up shots of some larva these are what the cells look like up close they're not as perfect as you might think they are they're fringed at the top and they're not quite perfectly hexagonal they're sometimes a little bit cylindrical [Music] here i'm focusing two on these two larva here the yellowish ones there's a white one kind of down in the back there that's a juvenile larva but these two larvae here in the front um one is starting to prep for the silk cap to be put on and the other one's dealing with a silk cap or silk string that she that she must have produced and is getting ready to attach it to the side [Music] you see i went going hard at work prepping her site so i gave him a little bit of food and watch how she sucks it right up right into the gob so cool to see that up close that's oh see angry hey turkey because i gotta go feed the chickens are you camera shy squirrely squirrels little squirmy squibs but there's yummy sunflower seeds growing squirrel look at those nipples well look at the nipples you have you never know a squirrel that has such big nipples [Music] you

Channel: Hornet King

Views: 231,151

Keywords: Hornet King, Wasp Nest Removals, Macro Shots Insects, Macro, Ground Bees, Yellow Jackets Nest

Id: Juc1_tV4Wd8

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020