Wasp Nests Removals £65.00 Fixed Price
07942 817644
The Wasp Man specialises in Wasp Nests Removals at a fixed price of just £65.00, bees at £75.00
We range from Preston and Blackburn in the north, including Chorley, Adlington, Bolton, Trafford Borough including Sale, Altrincham, Stretford and Urmston, Manchester, Liverpool, Knowsley, The Wirral, Knutsford, Lymm, Southport and Sefton, Atherton and Leigh, Wigan Borough, Runcorn, Widnes and Warrington.
Our price is fixed and we work seven days per week.
We are fully insured, members of the NPTA and CRB checked.
If you can see lots of wasps coming and going from a hole then you have a wasp nest. We are often able to offer a same day service, especially if you call before midday, we accept cash, PayPal and all major credit cards on site or you may pre-pay by telephone if you wish.
We can often make arrangements to destroy the wasp nest while you are out if access is possible, we do not usually need to enter the property, the nests are destroyed from the outside.
Unlike many other companies we do not demand prepayment and are happy to accept payment on site when the work is complete. We offer a range of payment options, please consult our payments page for details.
Ladders
Please note that our operatives do not carry ladders and are not allowed to use ladders other than short step-ladders.
We use telescopic extension lances which gives us a reach of around 10 metres (33 feet) from the ground which is more than adequate for most domestic properties.
If the entrance to the nest is above gutter height and not visible from the ground please inform us when you phone. For nests high on rooftops, in roof valleys etc it may be necessary to send a two man climbing team at increased cost.
If ladders are required we will carry out an initial survey and give you a quotation for the work free of charge. This satisfies our obligations under Working at Heights regulations and is safer for you, your property and our operatives.
Please do not ask our operatives to use your personal ladders.
Seasonal Update Today is Thursday, May, 25th 2023.
We can always be emailed at [email protected] but for a more rapid service please phone us.
If you need a wasps’ nest destroying quickly we are the right company for you but we don’t pick our email up until the end of the day so a phone call is always quicker.
The Wasp Man will supply a fully trained and insured professional technician to treat your wasps nest or other pest control problems and to advise you on aftercare.
All our work is fully guaranteed and on the very rare occasions where we don’t get the nest first time we will call back free of charge. (Subject to a few conditions, of course.)
Prices
Our prices are fixed for the whole of our region (and we don’t charge extra for evenings and weekends).
No need to pre-pay, we accept cash and all major credit cards on site after the work is done. Wasp Nest- £65.00 (No additional call out charge) Second nest on same property free of charge on same visit. 3rd and subsequent nests £15 each (same property/same visit). Bees (Honey or Bumble) – £75.00 (No additional call out charge)
Callout Charge- £25, only applicable where you have called us to a situation which does not require our services.
To minimise the possibility of this expense, we recommend that you read the pages Wasps, Bees or Hornets and Wasp Nest Dos and Don’ts carefully and/or call for advice.
We are usually cheaper and more efficient than your local authority. Plus, we can destroy your nest in the evening after you finish work or at the weekend and there will be no extra charge.
It is rare indeed to have a live wasps’ nest in our area before early June at the earliest, if you are seeing ‘wasps’ in April or May they will almost certainly turn out to be harmless solitary bees which require no action to be taken.
You may save yourself a callout charge by visiting our Seasonal Chart Page.
You may not even have to wait in for us! You can pay in advance over the telephone using a credit or debit card, tell us where you have seen the wasps flying and arrange for us to access the outside of your property. Alternatively you may make a direct payment into our bank account, however please make sure that you have correctly identified the insects and are paying the correct price.
Checking for wasps
A useful check to carry out in summer is to wait for a hot, sunny day in mid-July and walk all around your house looking up and down, in air-bricks and chimneys etc and if you have a wasp nest you will clearly see wasps coming and going at an alarming rate.
Ring us then before the queens emerge in mid-September and you will break the breeding cycle. If you think you have a wasp nest on your property, check our Wasps, Bees or Hornets? page to be certain and to save yourself a callout charge, then call today. Just a word of caution, ‘wasps’ in chimney stacks often turn out to be honeybees. If you see comings and goings from the chimney DO NOT light the fire, call us.
Professional Treatment
Although some domestic pests can be eliminated with DIY products, do not try to get rid of a wasp nest yourself, it is extremely dangerous and you may possibly sustain many stings as wasps are extremely protective of their nests.
While you await our technician’s visit, have a look at our Wasps Nest Dos and Don’ts page and find out how to help us help you. People frequently ask The Wasp Man to get rid of a wasps’ nest or remove a wasps’ nest.
Physically removing a wasp nest, is in practice neither necessary nor desirable.
Our technician will inject a small amount of insecticide into the entrance of the nest, then the returning workers will carry it into the nest with them and the entire colony will die within a couple of hours.
Pest Controllers do not remove a wasp nest, even on the very rare occasions when it would be possible, since it is necessary to leave it in place for the returning workers to enter. The nest itself is just paper and will crumble away. A wasp nest lasts for one year only and is never re-used.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE…do not seal the entrance to the nest in the hope that the wasps will go elsewhere, they won’t and you will just make the job ten times more difficult.
If you have sealed the entrance with mastic, cement, expanding foam etc then you need to remove this and fully open up the entrance to the nest BEFORE CALLING US OUT.
We cannot do the job if the entrance is not open. If the entrance is sealed when we arrive we will charge you extra for the additional time and we may not be able to do the job at all in which case there will be a callout fee as per our terms and conditions.
Sealing the nest entrance is the WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT YOU CAN DO.
Late in the season, things change
There are some issues when dealing with nests later in the year which may require a different process.
If you discover that you have a nest later than mid-September then we suggest that you read our page Dealing With Late Season Wasp Nests.
A little About Wasps
Although there are many species of wasps in the world only three species trouble us as pests in North West Britain, our two traditional species the Common Wasps (Vespula vulgaris), the German Wasp (Vespula germanica) and a relative new-comer to our area the Median Wasp (Dolichovespula media) occasional dubbed ‘the Euro Wasp’ by the press.
The Median Wasp started to be commonplace in our area about 15 years ago and the press gave it a lot of coverage deeming it to be more aggressive and dangerous than our more native wasps.
In fact this is not really true, the problem with this wasp is that unlike Germanica and Vulgaris which usually build their nests inside structures such as lofts and eaves, it tends to build its nest in trees and bushes which brings it into contact with people much more often. We have had many instances of children being badly stung whilst trying to retrieve a football from a bush in the garden.
All wasps’ nests start afresh every single year, no nest is ever used again which is why there is no need to physically remove a nest at the end of the season.
When the wasp queens awake from hibernation in early spring they feed on aphids and grubs and commence nest construction.
The queen chews rotting wood and mixes it with saliva to make ‘wasp paper’ from which she constructs a small nest about the size of a golf ball. You can see a video of this process in the right sidebar of this page.
April and May
These golf-ball sized nests can appear very rapidly indeed, you can often find them in garden sheds in May.
Inside this nest she lays around 15-20 eggs and tends the new baby wasps until they are able to fly. Once the first batch of wasps are flying they take over nest construction and the queen concentrates on laying eggs inside the nest.
This process takes time which is why we instantly know when people ring us in April and May that they are seeing bees not wasps. Harmless solitary bees do look superficially like wasps and are commonplace in April and May.
The most rapid period of wasp nest growth is in late June and July and in a good summer, with plenty availability of food, a wasp nest can reach the size of a council wheelie bin and house 30,000 wasps over the course of the summer.
During the bulk of the summer all the wasps produced by the nest are sterile females, they cannot build nests themselves nor can a nest ‘move’. People often suspect that wasps have moved from one side of their house to the other but in fact this is impossible, it is merely a second nest which they had not previously noticed.
At the end of the summer, around mid-September the nest produces males and queens, on average a nest will produce around 2000 queens and it is now when the wasp nest becomes really troublesome.
Summertime
During the summer these worker wasps are rewarded for feeding the grubs in the wasp nest by a sweet substance produced by the larvae. During this period the workers are collecting aphids and caterpillars and are generally a friend to the gardener.
However, once we hit autumn all this changes. The queen runs out of eggs and the nest ceases to produce any more young wasps. The workers are now deprived of their sweet ‘fix’ and start to crave sweet foods such as rotting fruit.
It is now when they are at their most bothersome and when most stings occur.
If you have a wasps’ nest we would strongly recommend getting it treated before this stage.
We do have hornets (Vespa crabro) in Britain but they are almost exclusively confined to the southern counties, we have only ever seen one hornets’ nest in our area.
For some reason there is an urban myth in the North West that hornets are like tiny wasps, this is a complete fallacy as hornets are very much larger than wasps. In fact hornets are the largest of the social wasps family.
Although it is quite easy to distinguish between the three wasp species it is in practice not necessary as the treatment is the same for all species.
At the end of summer with the arrival of the first cold weather the workers and males die off and the queens hibernate for the winter ready to start the whole process off again the following spring, however wasps’ nests can survive much later into the autumn than many people expect.
It is common for us to deal with a few nests as late as November and our absolute record for destroying a live wasps’ nest was Xmas eve.
However, people who have allowed a wasps’ nest to produce queens on their property may find that they are troubled by queens all winter long as the central heating tends to bring them out of hibernation.
Honey Bees
Unlike wasps the entire honeybee colony survives the winter, which is the reason they make honey. As they do not have a ‘lead-time’ for the nest to be built like wasps they are amongst the earliest of the hymenoptera (wasps and bees) to be seen in spring, often flying on warm days as early as February. Often they will move into structures such as chimney pots or air-bricks, often they will simply hang in the branches of a tree whilst their workers look for a suitable place to live. It can be very dramatic and even frightening when a swarm arrives but in reality they are fairly docile as they have no nest or honey to defend in this stage.
If they are accessible such as in a tree it is usually a simple matter to collect them into a container and rehouse them with a beekeeper.
Chimney Pots
If they move into a structure, especially a chimney pot, then speed is of the essence as once they have started to produce honey, which happens remarkably quickly, there are legal constraints which invariable increase the cost of dealing with them. We ourselves are beekeepers and are experienced in handling and re-homing swarms.
Contrary to urban myth honey bees are not protected and sometimes there is no alternative but to destroy them although for us this will always be a last resort. We will always try to re-home them if at all possible. Please ensure that you do have honey bees and not bumble bees before troubling a professional, bumble bees are not the bees which make honey and are of no use to a beekeeper.
Unusual weather
Variable weather makes every wasping year different! The terrible summer of 2012 in Britain meant that many people failed to spot the fact that they had a wasps’ nest on their property, after all it was not a good summer for outdoor activities.
Many nests which would normally have been destroyed were allowed to go full term and produce their queens, about 2000 per nest on average…as a result we saw many situations during 2013 with several wasps’ nests in close proximity.
Some customers found 5 or 6 nests on their property, some neighbourhoods had several nests in a row along the street. The long, cold spring, however slowed their development significantly such that they continued to be discovered much later into the summer.
It was common for us to return more than once to a home which had no sign of additional nests on our first visit, whereas we usually find all nests with a survey on our first visit.
Tree Bumblebees
The Tree Bumblebee can be very aggressive
Another unusual feature of the summer of 2014 was the explosion in callouts for the Tree Bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum).
We do not routinely destroy bee colonies, since bees are generally harmless unless provoked and important for pollination, however this particular non-native species can be extremely aggressive when the nest senses vibration, even walking by is enough, and we have had several instances of customers being attacked by them while gardening, especially mowing the lawn.
You will find nests in birdboxes, cracks and crevices in garden walls and in cavity wall and roof voids in your house. It looks as though this species is here in the North West to stay, so check your bird boxes early this year before getting the lawnmower out!
We saw exponential increases in callouts last year and are getting prepared for an explosion of Tree Bumblebee colonies in 2017! For more information on the Tree Bumblebee, check our Wasps, Bees or Hornets page.
A first for us in 2012 was a call out to a hornets’ nest. European hornets (Vespa crabro) are usually only found in southern Britain and about as far north as the southern midlands.
Then in 2014 we heard in the media of an expected influx of Asian hornets (Vespa velutina) which will be a completely new visitor to the UK. If you see something that looks like a hornet, give us a call for advice. Years ago we’d have told you we don’t see hornets in the North West, but now we are likely to advise a visit to check.
You can read more about Asian hornets on our Wasps, Bees or Hornets page. If you have a problem with other pests such as ants, fleas or bedbugs follow the links for more information or call today for advice.
Preston and Blackburn, Chorley, Adlington, Bolton, Trafford Borough including Sale, Altrincham, Stretford and Urmston, Manchester, Liverpool, Knowsley, The Wirral, Knutsford, Lymm, Southport and Sefton, Atherton and Leigh, Wigan Borough, Runcorn, Widnes and Warrington.