How to Identify Wasp Nests

Watch the Traffic, Not the Wasps

A few wasps drifting round the garden in July tell you almost nothing. Wasps forage over a wide area, and the ones on your patio table may have come from several gardens away.

What does tell you something is a flight line. Stand still at a safe distance, somewhere you can see the roofline or the side of the shed, and give it five minutes. If wasps are arriving and leaving at the same small point, over and over, in both directions, there is a nest behind that point.

Mid-morning on a warm, dry day is the easiest time to see it. In cool or wet weather the traffic slows and a nest can look quiet when it is not.

What the Nest Itself Looks Like

Where the nest is in the open, in a shed, a loft or a hedge, it is quite distinctive once you know what you are looking at.

In spring

A queen starts the nest alone. It is small, roughly the size of a golf ball or smaller, often hanging from a single short stalk under a beam or a roof edge. It is grey or buff, papery, and open at the bottom. At this stage there is usually only the queen, coming and going.

By midsummer

Once the first workers hatch, the nest grows fast. The outside becomes a rounded shell made of thin layers of paper, with a scalloped or swirled pattern where each strip was added. The colours vary with whatever wood the wasps chewed, so bands of grey, fawn and brown are normal. There is usually one entrance hole near the bottom.

In late summer

An established nest can be anything from a football to something much larger, and in a loft it may be moulded around the rafters and insulation rather than hanging neatly. At this point it is rarely something you want to be close to.

Hidden Nests: Reading the Signs from Outside

Most nests are not visible at all. They are behind a soffit, under roof tiles, inside a wall cavity or below ground, and the only part you see is the entrance.

• Roofline: wasps disappearing into a gap between a tile and the fascia, or at the end of a soffit board.
• Walls: traffic into an airbrick, a weep vent or a crack in the pointing.
• Indoors: a faint rustling or scratching behind a ceiling or wall in the warmer months, or wasps turning up inside a room with no open window to explain it.
• Ground: wasps rising out of the lawn or a bank from one spot, covered in more detail in our post on a wasp nest in the ground.
• Outbuildings: a nest in the roof corner of a shed or garage, dealt with in wasp nests in sheds.

Do not poke, tap or shine a torch into an entrance to confirm what is behind it. The flight line is enough evidence, and disturbing the entrance is the quickest way to get stung.

Is It Wasps at All?

Before anyone treats anything, be sure it is wasps. Common wasps are yellow and black with sharp, clean bands and very little hair. They fly fast and fairly directly into the nest.

Honey bees are browner and furrier, and a swarm hanging in a tree or a colony in a chimney is a job for a beekeeper, not a pest controller. Bumblebees are large and round, and their small nests are usually best left in peace. Hornets are noticeably bigger, with brown and orange-yellow colouring. If you are unsure, a clear photo taken from a distance is the easiest way to settle it, and we are happy to look.

Old Nests and What They Mean

Many people find a nest in the loft in winter and assume they have a problem. A grey paper nest with no wasps around it in the colder months is an old one. Wasp colonies do not survive the winter, and a nest is not used a second season.

An empty nest is a record of last summer, not a warning about this one.

It does tell you that the spot suits wasps, so it is worth watching that area from late spring onwards. If you see a new flight line starting there, that is a new colony.

Once You Have Found One

If you are confident it is an active wasp nest and it is anywhere near a door, a path or a play area, leave it alone and keep people back from it. The wasp nest removal service explains how treatment works, and the wasp nest removal price is a £90 fixed cost with no call-out fee. If you are weighing up whether to leave it, our guide on leaving a wasp nest untreated goes through the choice. Call 01223 902388 and tell us where you have seen the traffic.