Comparing Hornet and Wasp Killer Sprays By Cost and Distance and How Quickly - Part 1

A few days ago, I had my brother-in-law haul my trailer from being stored in a field near them to my house so I wouldn't have to pull out my suburban to go get it as they are building a home near where I store my trailer. 

The field has NO grass or weeds and is just a dirt field a friend of theirs owns. I didn't worry about spiders as there is no tall grass and I haven't ever really had much of a problem with that so was thinking this year would be easy as there were no bugs to worry about in a dirt dry field. 

My sister called saying her husband got stung by a wasp while reaching under the hitch. I felt horrible about that and felt guilty for asking them to pick it up anyway with how busy they are working on their new house. 

They dropped it off in the dark and we just wedged some blocks under the tires and unhitched it that night. I have some repairs I wanted to do on it before we go to the lake next month. 

I headed out to the trailer and opened the hatch to plug it in and immediately got stung by a wasp. I didn't see a nest or hive. I just felt the sting and when I flicked my hand, saw a wasp fly off. I immediately ran from the area and it followed me. I got far enough away and in a few minutes went to the opposite side and was opening the door when a wasp came from under the trailer and few at me in attack mode. I ran off to the garage and pulled out some wasp killer I had. 

A few years back, I purchased a lot of cans of wasp spray as a self defense item for the girls. I have one by each bed and one in each car. I heard somewhere that a gun is hard to aim and hit and can be dangerous to the user as I personally know two people who have been shot by a friend or shot themselves accidentally. Pepper spray you need to be super close to make work but hornet spray shoots up to 20 feet. 

I pulled it open and went to the trailer and immediately saw a nest in the heater exhaust pipe and saw hornets going into the other pipe. I was 15 feet away and shot it and it was a great shot and killed them almost on contact. The top of the sprayer oozed a bit but I am sure it had been dropped a few times over the years. 

I usually just hook up a hose to a high pressure nozzle and stand 20 feet away and hit the nests on the fences that way but I didn't have any last year and haven't had any in the yard this year either. 

I sprayed the vents several times and then took a stick and started poking it in there. Each time, more and more hornets came out and I would spray it again. 

I found that I had to take off the vent covers to get the nests / hives out of the vent pipes and the one had three hives in it, There were larva in the nests and I am sure that is why the hornets were so defensive about the hives, 

I then got on a ladder and sprayed the rest of the one can on a nest just inside the air-conditioner cover and there were six dead hornets on the outside of the cover and about 15 on the inside that dropped down in. There was larva in that hive as well. 

I had an air-conditioning guy coming to check out the electrical and he wanted to check the a/c unit and I figured that there would probably be hives there.. He knocked out about four when he took the cover off but all the hornets were dead. 

On the other side of that, live hornets kept coming back to the hive. I kept having to spray new hornets from outside coming to the hive for a few hours as I worked on the outside of the trailer. The worker found a hive just inside the fridge vent cover and I sprayed it and it was also full of larva. In the end, there were probably 10 - 12 nest or hives on the trailer. I have never seen more than one on it ever. Last summer we had one inside the air vent cover while camping and I had to use a squirt gut to soak it through the inside screen and then open the cover to let them fly away and then remove the screen to get the hive out. 

I guess in the small town, they have more of a problem as I have never had that problem to that degree. I know when I cleaned out the heat vents a few years back, there were a few small empty nests inside but these were huge full nests / hives. 

I had to pull out two other sprays as I ran out of the Spectracide. The Raid brand shot about five feet and was foamy but the wasps were crawling through it and it smelled like a spider spray. It is more of a yard fogger spray so it may just be specific for all flying bugs but the foam coated the area and the wasps crawled through it and then flew away. I am sure it killed them at some point but they didn't drop and die like the other spray did. 

I also used an Ace brand spray which was more of a squirt gun type stream. Both the Ace and the Raid only shot about five feet. You had to get much closer to make them work well and I had to move super slow as to not get attacked by the wasps. 

I will post the second video showing me spraying the can of Spectracide and how far it shoots. I also learned some interesting things about wasps I will share as well as compare prices. Check out the photos closely as you can see wasps crawling into the vents and two in flight near the vents. 

Have a blessed day!