If you’re dealing with bees or wasps then your Broken Arrow pest control company can help. Oklahoma has a wide variety of insects in their ecosystem. Stinging insects are no exception. While there are many of these stinging insects out there, bees and wasps are the most common and most well-known. Many people will have issues with these insects, especially in the spring, summer and fall months. But the winner is not an exception to these insects. There are some extreme cases where wasps will find a way inside your house during the winter months. In this article, let’s take a good hard look at wasps and bees, their life cycle and what are you and your Broken Arrow pest control company can do to stop these insects from invading your home.
EUSOCIAL BEES AND WASPS AND BROKEN ARROW PEST CONTROL
Bees are a eusocial, hive insect. They have a queen bee that lays eggs, and worker bees that do the work of the colony. While bee colonies are a little simpler than termites or ants, they still divide their work up amongst the two different castes. Bees create a hexagonal hive system that not only stores and protects their young, but also stores and protects honey that they use to eat year-round.
Worker bees will search high and low for flowers with nectar in order to harvest this nectar, and bring it back to the hive. Once it regurgitates this nectar, it will pass between worker bee over and over again, continuing to regurgitate the nectar, essentially pasteurizing it. They will place the nectar inside the hexagonal cells, and then start to flap their wings excessively. Flapping their wings helps to dry out the nectar removing the water from it. The sugar starts become more prevalent, and you end up with a sticky substance that we know as honey. Call your Broken Arrow pest control company for more information.
WASP AND BEES AND BROKEN ARROW PEST CONTROL
Wasps will also during the spring and summer months collect nectar from flowers. This process is not in order to create a stored food like honey, but simply to feed the adult wasps. Wasps in the adult form need a lot of energy in order to complete the tasks that are necessary to reproduce and continue their lifecycle. This nectar will give them the energy to do so. Adult wasps will create nests that have cells in them as well. Some nests, such as in solitary wasps, will have a single cell in each nest, while social wasps will have a number of cells in their nest.
The female will lay her egg in each of the nest’s cells and then go out and hunt for food for its young. The young wasp needs a lot of protein in order to build the structures that it needs to become an adult wasp. The adult wasp will go around and hunt for small grubs and spiders. It will paralyze these insect with its sting and then carry them back to the nest, placing them in each cell with the egg. They will seal up the cell and go on about their life. Once the egg hatches, the lava will come out and consume the paralyzed insects and then move on through their lifecycle to develop into an adult wasp. Your Broken Arrow pest control company can help.
BEE AND WASP STINGS AND BROKEN ARROW PEST CONTROL
Both bees and wasps can sting you. The honey bee is somewhat unique in the fact that it has barb’s on its stinger. That means that when a worker bee does sting, the stinger will get stuck in your skin, and it will leave the stinger in your skin when it flies away. There are vital organs that will be left with the stinger, which means that the honey bee will die once it stings. It can only sting once, and then die.
Wasps and other bees use their stinger to hunt, and therefore have no barbs on their stinger. This means that they can sting multiple times. While bees use melittin in their sting create the stinging sensation in your skin, wasps use a cocktail of neurotoxins to create the painful sensation in their sting. This gives wasps the ability to paralyze their prey when it stings, while the bee simply protects its nest. Contact your Broken Arrow pest control company today.
OVERWINTERING WASPS AND BEES AND BROKEN ARROW PEST CONTROL
In the winter months, wasps will seek shelter during the fall. The males will mate with the females, and then die off in the fall months. The females will seek a place to overwinter. They find cracks and crevices to hide in, hoping to stay warm enough to survive the winter months. Once they do this, they will live dormant until the warmth of the spring comes, and then they will go towards the warmth and emerge. When wasps emerge from there hiding place, they will have to eat immediately. They must find a flower with nectar in order replenish there food supply, or they will die within a matter of hours.
Sometimes wasps will overwinter in areas not so convenient for us as humans. They will find a gap in your shingles or a hole in the siding and overwinter in these places. As the winter months begin, the dormant wasp will stay dormant. When you start to use your heat, often these wasps sense the heat inside your home and start to move towards it. Thinking that the spring is upon them, they will emerge inside your home. If they do, they will immediately search for a flower. Of course, in the winter months, there are no flowers, and therefore no nectar so these wasps die quite quickly. Many times we get calls about wasps in the winter months, and this is because these wasps think that it’s spring and come inside your house. They die often more quickly than we can kill them, and in most cases are harmless.
If you’re having an issue with wasps, bees or any other pests, then it’s time to call in your local Broken Arrow pest control company for help. Here at TermMax Pest Control, we are the best in the business when it comes to dealing with these insects. We service a greater Tulsa area, including Tulsa, Owasso, Turley, Broken Arrow , Coweta, Claremore, Catoosa, Sand Springs, Sapulpa, Prattville, Bixby, Jenks and much more. Call today for free estimate. We are here to help!