How To Prevent Wasp Attacks - How to Kill Wasps - Waspbane Assembly - How to Trap Wasps

Today I'm going to show you how to set up the Wasp Bane wasp trap. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I'm going to show you how to set up a Wasp Bane wasp trap today because the videos on YouTube have come straight out of the 1980s. I've never used these before, so all I'm doing is following the instructions, but I'll give you some better close-ups that are currently on YouTube And hopefully give you some advice as to how to set them up properly with some good images as well. I'm up at the Forest Apiary today doing a few different videos. One of them is a comparison between the Wasp Bane, standard wasp traps like this, and another wasp trap as well. So if you enjoy beekeeping, if you want to know how to keep wasps down in the summer, please hit that subscribe button. We've got loads of content about how to keep wasps down, how to manage your bees, honey extraction, Loads of other good stuff as well. So if you enjoy our content, please hit the subscribe button. Today's video though, I'm going to focus specifically on the wasp bane wasp trap though, and this has been proven to work so well at reducing the amount of wasps in your apiary. All I'm going to do in this video though is I'm just going to show you how to set it up. I'm also going to do another video showing you how many wasps I collect in this apiary throughout the whole of the season, and I'm going to do some comparison videos as well. So let's get straight on with it then. I'm going to put aside all of my other little gizmos, all of my other little tests. They're for another video that I'm doing at the moment. This in here is my super secret mix that I'll give you at the very end of this video if you want to know how to catch the most wasps as possible. This is the Waspbane Trap, and the Waspbane Trap is, is not cheap. It's definitely not the cheapest wasp trap on the market. This one here cost me about £35. Paid for it myself. However, I have seen wasp banes in action. I know people that use them. I know facilities and cafes and restaurants that use them as well, and they are so, so good at catching wasps and really targeting swarming wasps as well. So you get a few different bits to the wasp bane. You get this main chamber here that has a powder in it that's already included in the wasp bane there. You also get a column, which is where the bees come in and come out of the entrances, and then you get a little activator pack there and some instructions as well. So let's start off with getting the WaspBane together. So first of all, take your activator pack, put that off to one side. You then want to take the lid that sits on this main chamber here, take that off, screw that onto the top of the big chamber up here. This is how you hang it using this little noggin here. So that just needs to sit on the top just like that. That's how you're going to hang it up. Then you need to take this main chamber here, and there is a central cylinder, and you need to push that central cylinder down to open up the prongs. What you don't do though is you don't push it all the way in just yet. You should push that down, get it to a point where it's opened everything up. So this is what it should look like. You've got access down into the wasp vein there, into where all that powder is, but it's just sitting just Nearly flush. You don't want to push it in just yet, so that's what it should look like at the moment. So then you want to take your activator sachet, cut that open, get that straight into the mix. So open up your activator; that goes straight into the mix like that. Give it a really good shake, and then straight away you want to go in with your magic mix. And I'll show you what's in this magic mix at the end of the video. Now on the main chamber here, there's an approximate. Fill level and a safe fill level. You want to take it up to the approx fill level. There's about two inches from the bottom, so you need a decent amount of solution. Now you can give that a little bit of a shake. You don't need to go wild with it, just a little bit of a shake, just to get that all dissolved—the powder, the activator, and your solution—and then you take your main chamber screwed on the top there, and you want to push down, and you push that. Cylinder down into the main chamber here. So you've got your entrance block, main chamber, and that little cylinder should plonk in. It served its purpose keeping all of those little prongs open, which means that all of the wasps are going to get stuck. Then you just tighten everything up and that is it. We're completely set up. It looks so much more difficult on the other YouTube videos, but it is as simple as that. So hopefully that's a lot easier for you to follow than some of the other videos. I'll get a couple of close-ups now just showing you what this looks like in terms of looking down into it. So hopefully you can see there we've got the top entrance block, the main chamber full, and then if you look through, you can see a clear path for all of the wasps to get down there. And then if you look down in here, you can see Floating in all of that good solution, we've got that cylinder, and that's where it ends up. Little bit confusing, but hopefully that clears things up nicely. So there we go, we're all set up. You can either go and hang this somewhere in a tree, or you can just leave it somewhere around the apiary. Good to kind of keep it off the ground. You want it at a reasonable height. I'm going to go and put it on one of my stacked empty hives over there, and we'll see how many wasps we catch throughout the whole season. So make sure you stay tuned. I'll do a follow-up video later on in the year showing you how effective this wasp bane trap is. At collecting wasps, trapping them in your apiaries. Right, so what was in my secret mix that I used to bait up all of these different hornet and wasp traps? I used a mixture of my own honey— really, really careful to make sure that it's your own honey, can spread disease if you don't— used 100 grams of wildflower honey from my own bees. I used a mixture 50/50 of Guinness and cheap lager, cheaper the better, and then I topped it up with water as well. So in terms of the ratios, I use 100 grams of honey, I filled it up halfway in a litre bottle with Guinness and lager, and then I topped it up again with warm water to bring me up to a full litre bottle. That mix I find works really, really well. As soon as you get into late season, midsummer, It's irresistible to wasps. So we'll see how well the Wasp Bane does. I will do a follow-up video showing you just how effective this is. I'm also doing a follow-up video doing a comparison between these 3. So if you're interested in finding out how it goes, hit the subscribe button now and you'll see both of these videos pop up. But I hope you find that one useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.