BEE'S AROUND MY HUMMER FEEDER

Help! Does anyone in here have this same problem. These are yellow jackets just started hanging out on my hummer feeders. I have taken the feeders in and cleaned them throughly so nothing sticky was on them and to no avail. They keep coming back and my poor hummers have to dodge the bees. I posted this same plea for help in the brid forum but the only suggestion I got was to move the feeder. I have 3 hummer feeders hanging in different places, and there are yellow jackets at all three of them.

Thanks in advance

Deann

Deann, I am having the same problem. There is a yellow jacket trap I saw in Lowe's, but I sure don't want to attract more of them. I had put out some butterfly brew and they were attracted to this. I used a fly swatter to kill them. Along with the wasps.

Elaine

spray your feeding stations (not the glass part) with pam. the birds don't care; the bees and wasps won't land.

will try that.
thanks,

Another thing you might try is to mix up some super sweet nectar and pour it into a shallow tray at the far corner of your yard. I do that to keep bees away from the feeders. I don't want to kill off bees :o) They become really adept at honing in on the really sugary stuff.

As for yellow jackets and other pesky wasps...I'd do the wasp trap thing.

~ Cat

Google: Easy and Efficient Wasp Traps by Loryn Wilson

Just a slit in a two liter bottle - when full throw away and put out another. I remember reading once that when you take the liter bottle down..there may be a few still alive wasps in there --so bring a piece of tape to cover the slit.

Thanks everyone, gonna try the pam thing, and also put out a dish of sugar water at the back of my garden.......

Deann

Oh, no.. don't want to kill off the bees. I love them, they are my little pollinators.
Yes, they can track the sweet stuff. I had poured some of my hummingbird food on a rudbeckia and they were all over it the next morning.

Elaine

we need th e bees right now unfortunately. they are dying off just feed them somewhere else

Relax everyone.....I would never ever kill bee's.......these little devils on my hummer feeder are not bee's but yellow jackets....if you take a close look at the picture I posted you will see that.......and TRACKANSAND....thank you a hundred times over....the PAM worked......no more yellow jackets on the hummer feeders.....

I love this website!!

Deann

Ya know...I've never tried PAM but mom tells me she has lots of trouble with ants on the feeders that are hanging from trees....do ya'll think it will deter the ants?

Going to give it a try this weekend when I go visit.

~ Cat

ps...where do you think the wasps are going now that you've used PAM? If they come over to my yard - I know who to blame!!! HA! HA!

Well, I actually used 'Kroger' myself. And I think it is working. Cat, you are too funny. I gave some of mine a map and sent them southwest..

Elaine

Cat....

Well if the yellow jackets are coming from Michigan, you are gonna have to wait a few more days.....as its a long long trip from where I live......I am about 180 miles north of Detroit as I live in Northern Michigan........

I grease my shephard hooks with vasaline and the ants won't climb it to get to the feeders....they sorta get stuck on the bottom....cruel I know, but effective.....

Deann

you're SO welcome! glad to have helped. just to clarify once again: spraying pam on the feeders does NOT hurt the bees or anything else, it just encourages them to go somewhere else.

I didn't see any yellow jackets on feeders today.. thanks for that tip.

Elaine

Take your hummer feeders in for a couple of days. The bees will realise it's time to moveon to other flowers.Happens all the time in the bees world, flowers bloom and then they fade and other flowers bloom and you move on. They'll adapt.

I had the same problem. It started out with my birdbath. The reason it's happening is drought. We get some rain and it will let up. Bees are like the rest of us, if we spot a shortcut, we'll take it. Until it doesn't seem to work any more, then we go back to the normal way. I took mine in parts of three days--brought it out when I spotted the hummers zipping around looking for the feeder and let them sip some so they wouldn't write me off as a worthy stopping place. But after two days the number of bees went down from about a hundred at a time, to about ten or fifteen. Then I brought them out and hung them in new places.

Things are back to normal.

Melis

here's my feeder at a lull in the activity. Usually there's twice tht and the same number stacked up and waiting for a runway.

The hummers don't seem too intimidated. I was trying to simply be tolerant and let them do what they need to do, until I nearly drank a bee upending a bottle of rootbeer. Poured out half the bottle out on the ground trying to rescue the silly little thing! Took her forever to get over it. And it was DIET! Imagine how many I'd have swallowed if it'd been 'the real thing'! So that's when I decided to do something about it.

I wrote a beekeeping list and asked what might be best to do and they were the ones recommended taking the feeders in for a few days.

Things seem to have settled down now. They're still ganging my birdbath, though. I guess they're really thirsty.

Melis

I use vaseline jelly rubbed on the hook that attaches to the trees/hangers and never have a problem anymore. I reapply it when I clean and refill the feeders.

Hi! Everybody!!

My neighbors and I have been trying to get rid of the yellow-jackets for many years. I saw the other day where one of my neighbors called in an exterminator who specializes in yelllow-jacket wasps. I am tempted to go to him but first I have to find out how he does it. It wouldn't make much sense to get rid of the yellow-jackets AND the butterflies. In the meantime, on another forum I heard that wasps will lay their eggs on caterpillars for food for their larvae. Darned if you do and darned if you don't.


Thanks,

Chuck

I tried to "Google" for that 2litr wasp / yellow jacket disposal thing, but never could find it. I have another strange thing to announce...more than once a wasp has attacked the meal worms that are set out in the dish for my bluebirds.....maybe if I write about this in the BB thread others , may have experience...they sure have seemed determined to sting the heck out of a number of the little mws though..weird

On the local news, the gardening expert suggested putting vaseline or shortening (I think veg. oil would work better) on the top chain for the ants and to rub it on the place where the yellow jackets would land.....they can't hold on.

Von

Not wierd, Birdie, parasitic. There are several kinds of wasps that will use larval animals to implant their eggs in. Some of them sting the larvae into paralysis and fly off with the larva and put it in a hole in the ground, thus setting up a safe place for thier offspring with a built-in food supply. This is probably the kind of wasp activity you saw.

Melis

wow Melis-- Thanks...that sure sounds like what I saw happening, except the wasps kept fidgeting with the MW's, for a little while then flew off and left the ones they had "stung". I observed this a number of different days, but never did see any wasp fly off with the MW... Thanks lots for the interesting info. I really enjoy understanding more about what I observe in nature. And I never have been one to "not ask questions"...drove people nuts when I was a kid. ;-))