Year of the wasp

COEUR d'ALENE - Janet Haworth is allergic to wasp stings, and she'll be the first to admit the resentment she has accrued since one sting left her with a leg too swollen to walk is, well, a bit over the top.

"Obsessive," she calls it.

Which means she hates them, and doesn't mind watching them die.

"I want to count them," she said of the wasp corpses she has collected from the five bee traps placed outside the back patio of her home on Bonnell Road. "I'm a little obsessive. I haven't yet, but I want to know how many there are."

After Haworth's traps fill - which is often - she puts them in the freezer to kill off the remaining wasps and then bags the bodies. She has been trapping them since the beginning of August, when she realized the number of yellow jackets interrupting her outdoor chores were dramatically higher than anything she can remember.

Watering flowers had become frantic. Firing up the barbecue, fearsome.

"Oh my goodness, I get chased back in," she said of fleeing her backyard grill for the indoors. "They just seem to be super aggressive."

Experts agree: Wasps are out in droves this summer, and property owners, outdoors lovers and everyone else should brace for a buzzing August and September.

People can do a number of things keep the insects away, they said, but the winged stingers are going to be flying around in big numbers for a few more months.

"Yes, indeed, this is a bad year," said Sandy Kegley, forest entomologist for the U.S. Forest Service, clarifying the bad year was for humans, not yellow jackets. "It's a good year for them."

While numbers are anecdotal, the U.S. Forest Service and University of Idaho Extension Office, along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, agree: There's a ton of 'em.

One major reason why is because the spring was short and warm. Basically, because it didn't freeze, the wasps didn't die. And the warm conditions were ideal for the queen bees to lay eggs, so once they started reproducing, they didn't stop.

"The workers got off to a good start and they kept going," as Kegley put it.

Hardware stores from Coeur d'Alene to St. Maries can't keep bee spray or bee traps on the shelf, either.

John Hughes, owner of Hughes Ace Hardware, said last August he sold about 300 cans of Ace's standard bee spray. So far this August, he has sold 1,500 cans. Once the cans arrive on a shipment truck every Monday, they're sold out before the next truck can come on Friday.

"We just don't know how to react," he said of trying to plan how much spray and traps he should order. "It's one of those things where you think, 'OK, it's got to slow down,' and it hasn't."

John Montandon, owner of Sherman Hardware in Coeur d'Alene, is in a similar boat. He said the demand really hit his store after the big box retailers ran out of spray, and he has done three or four times the bee business this summer compared to last.

"And that's being conservative," he said of his estimate.

Jennifer Shepard, manager at Advanced Pest Control, said 90 percent of their calls for service is for wasp and bee problems, while the city's parks department said that it has received more bee calls about flying stingers this summer than before.

The population explosion is mostly wasps, hornets and yellow jackets, not so much bees. Those with traps should load them with meat and set them a little away from areas where people want to hang out, according to the U of I Extension Office.

Another trick, water lawns in the evening so the lawn is dry in the mornings. The wasps are looking for food and water right now. So if those entertaining guests outside can try setting their sprinkler to a trickle as far away as possible. The jackets should fly that way and drink up.

Another helpful tip, according to Kegley, don't wear bright colors and perfume. They can mistake a person for a flower, after all.

Feared as they may be, wasps aren't out to get humans. Though wasps can sting repeatedly and go about their day, they're not looking for a fight. They attack when their nests are disturbed or if they think they're being assaulted, say by a swatting hand. And if that swatting hand happens to smash one, the dead wasp sends out a scent calling for other wasps to help out. So, one smashed wasp is an invitation for hoards more.

But as a predator and pollinator, wasps are valuable to nature's balance, Kegley added, which makes advocating killing them a difficult pitch.

"It's a touchy situation," she said.

But Haworth, who last went to the hospital because of a sting in 1992, delights in knowing she's trapping and killing her arch enemies. She has never felt like a prisoner in her own home before - and she has lived there for 20 years.

Finally, on Monday, curiosity got the best of her and she opened the frozen, bagged wasps and counted her kills: 1,469 dead wasps.

"I'm going to get more traps," she said. "I'm going to actually make a dent."