How To Survive Stinging Insect Season

Posted May 22, 2023

There’s so much to enjoy about spring and summer in New Mexico. The gorgeous landscape comes alive and the longer days breathe life into us all; it’s the perfect time of year. Perfect for you, me, and sadly stinging insects. Wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets are waking up for the year.

Rather than having you hide out and miss the best parts of the year, we’ll give you a handy list of ways to identify these stinging insects and some methods of preventing them from settling in your home and yard, as well as how to get rid of them.

Identifying Stinging Insects:

Mud Daubers: 1 inch long, slender with bulbous body segments, they’re scary looking but quite docile in nature. They construct tubes of mud for their nests around residential areas.
Paper Wasps: .75 to 1.25 inches in length, they tend to have slimmer abdomen and darker coloration when compared to paper wasps. They get their name from their umbrella-shaped paper-like nests.
Yellow Jackets: .5 to 1 inch long, bright yellow and black in their coloration. They’re more aggressive than the former two, especially at the end of summer. They live in large colonies with up to 4,000 yellow jackets at a time.
Tarantula Hawk Wasps: 1.5 inches in length, dark brown with orange/light brown wings. While its sting is listed as the most painful, they’re highly peaceful. Largely solitary and living in burrows it’s best to leave them alone.

How To Prevent Stinging Insects From Settling In.

Now that you can identify some of the more common stinging insects you’ll be seeing around your property it’s time to get either rid of them or prevent them from moving in. Here’s what you can do:

Clean Up and Secure Food Waste: Wasps and yellow jackets are drawn to sweet food smells. A great first step in wasp and yellow jacket prevention is to clean up any food scraps in your yard/home. Make sure the trash container is sealed tightly shut so the insects can’t find them.
Use Essential Oils: Another great form of stinging insect prevention is the use of essential oil spray. Scents like citronella, lemongrass, and mint are known to deter stinging insects. Spray these essential oils on your property lines and lawn to help keep them away.
Aerosol Spray Treatments: If there’s a nest on your property, using a spray can insecticide with a long-range stream (roughly 20 feet) can be a handy way of dealing with a nest. Thoroughly saturate the nest from a distance, and spray it a couple more times after the wasps or yellowjackets have vacated to ensure they don’t come back.
Soapy Water: If you’re trying to avoid chemical warfare as your form of wasp and yellowjacket prevention, soapy water can do the trick. Soap can suffocate wasps and yellowjackets, so using a spray bottle or even a water gun as a delivery method is an easy way of killing any stinging insects on your property.

Professional New Mexico Exterminators

If the infestation on your property has become too much for you to deal with alone, at New Mexico Pest Control we’re ready to help. We offer various services like TAP Insulation and PestFree365+ to ensure that once your infestation has been cleared out, it stays gone. We offer our services for not only homes but condominiums, apartments, and even commercial properties to guarantee you can enjoy the outdoors pest free. Contact us today for a FREE no-obligation quote!