Research to find the best lure for trapping the spotted wing drosophila serendipitously put Dr. Peter Landolt on the scent of a better way to deal with paper wasps.
Landolt and colleague Dr. Dong Cha, who are based at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s laboratory in Wapato, Washington, developed a new lure for spotted wing drosophila. Scientists in Mississippi, who are cooperating in the project, tested the new lure alongside a standard bait of wine and vinegar to trap spotted wing drosophila in blueberries. They found that the wine and vinegar mixture also attracted lots of paper wasps.
This caught Landolt’s attention because of a project he’s been working on for the U.S. Air Force to find a way to control paper wasps in air traffic control towers. It also happens that another species of paper wasp, Polistes dominula, can be a troublesome pest in cherry orchards and vineyards in the Pacific Northwest.
Landolt’s experience with wasp attractants goes back to the late 1980s, when he worked for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Gainesville, Florida. He had a project funded by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration to rid the space shuttle launch pad of swarming wasps. Paper wasps tend to aggregate in the fall around elevated structures, such as treetops, towers, and high-rise buildings. At Cape Kennedy, female wasps had aggregated to overwinter inside a mechanical room at the top of a 490-foot-high launch tower. Male wasps swarmed around the outside of the room to intercept the females and mate with them, and in the process were alarming employees working on the tower. This happened during a period when there had been a dearth of shuttle launches.
Before Landolt and his colleagues were able to find a solution, NASA launched a shuttle. Since the whole launch pad goes up in flames as a shuttle lifts off, the problem was solved.
Air traffic control
More recently, Landolt has been working on a similar project for the U.S. Air Force, which has a wasp problem at its air traffic control towers. Wasps are attracted to the towers, which in the southeastern United States tend to be the tallest structures on the horizon. Landolt said the design of the towers makes it easy for wasps to find their way inside the towers and into the control rooms. For the most part, the wasps that get inside the tower are the females that sting.
“If you’ve got somebody at a panel watching radar of aircraft coming and going, coming and going, and they’ve got wasps crawling on them and walking across the screen, it can be unnerving,” he said.
Landolt said he and his colleagues have been working to develop a chemical attractant for those wasps so they can be trapped. Traps for yellowjackets, which he previously developed, don’t work well for paper wasps.
A breakthrough came a couple of years ago when Landolt learned that those wine and vinegar traps being used in the spotted wing drosophila tests in Mississippi were attracting large numbers of Polistes metricus and P. bellicosus paper wasps, even though they’d not been noticed flying around. This was intriguing, given the dearth of useful baits and attractants known for paper wasps. It was the first indication of a useful bait for trapping paper wasps.
Field tests at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, and the University of Florida, Gainesville, confirmed that wine and vinegar baits attracted paper wasps.
However, in lab tests, when wasps were exposed to wine and vinegar separately, they preferred wine. They were attracted to ethanol (a major volatile of wine) and deterred by acetic acid (a major volatile of vinegar), which Landolt found somewhat surprising. Yellowjackets, which are related to paper wasps, are attracted to acetic acid combined with isobutanol.
The wasps’ orientation to fermented baits is likely to be food-finding behavior that they use in nature to locate fermented sweet materials. In the field, paper wasps feed on carbohydrate-rich foods such as fruit, sap, honeydew of sucking insects, and plant nectaries. As a sweet fruit product ages, it ferments first to alcohol and then to vinegar. Landolt said it could be that the paper wasp’s preference for alcohol matches up with its preference for natural food sources that have not aged too much.
Based on these results, Landolt and Cha worked in the lab to isolate and identify volatile chemicals in wine that are particularly attractive to the wasps and could be used as a lure. This spring, they sent out an experimental lure
containing a combination of volatiles that they identified to test on paper wasps in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina.
Meanwhile, the researchers have done lab tests with P. dominula, the species that attacks cherries and grapes in the Pacific Northwest, to find out how it reacts to wine and vinegar.
Landolt said P. dominula, known as the European paper wasp, is generally only a problem in small orchards or vineyards with nearby buildings that provide enclosed nesting places for the wasps. The insects commonly nest under eaves or within enclosed spaces such as in meter boxes, inside pipes, or between shakes.
“They generally don’t nest out in the field or orchard,” he said.
Paper wasps are not usually a big problem in cherries, other than in late districts, because the fruit is picked before populations explode in the late summer.
Landolt said P. dominula is often confused with yellowjackets, but the wasps need to be accurately identified because of paper wasps not being attracted to yellowjacket traps.
But what kind of trap did they put the wine and vinegar in to catch the wasp…
“paper wasps feed on carbohydrate-rich foods such as fruit” – so use fruit as bait. Seems ridiculously obvious.
What kind of trap did she use?
So, did it work? lol
Thank you for addressing this. I noticed my wasp traps we’re catching the wrong kind of wasps, while the paper wasps congregated unscathed. I notice the subtle differences in outward characteristics. The ones that are a nuisance have reddish tipped antennas and feet, and when they fly, their butt and back legs hang significantly lower than their top half. I cannot seem to find a target trap for these waps. They keep trapping the non aggressive ones with yellow antennas and legs. I believe it is the paper wasp I’m trying to rid myself of.
You are describing the European paper wasp. Use Rescue Trapstiks wasp traps. Walmart sells them the cheapest. They are a visual trap and the only kind that have worked for those wasps.
I have no luck with the Trapstiks.
7-29-18. My problem is a little more delicate: the paper wasps are hanging around my hummingbird feeder, it’s been going on for weeks, and I haven’t found their new nest. I already found a 1.5 inch paper nest close to the ground in the back yard, and that was easy to solve: I just sprayed them with water plus Dawn from a dedicated houseplant sprayer bottle, then removed the nest, end of problem. I have a feeling the new nest is somewhere nearby that I haven’t found yet. Hummies get very upset by wasps and bees, there usually seems lately to be one or two wasps on my hummy feeder. It’s a “non-gravity-dependent” feeder, so it never drips and never attracts ants. So I must decide what will be more attractive to the paper wasps than the 4:1 nectar in the hummy feeder, but not interesting to the hummingbirds, and it has to be something that won’t attract the hummies… just the wasps. It’s the end of July, so something sweet is probably in order, rather than protein, according to this and other websites I’ve looked at. Hmmmm. What can I use to stick or trap wasps that won’t hurt curious hummingbirds. I don’t drink wine or alcohol, so that’s out. I don’t drink bottled juice or soda either, so I’ll need to go to the nearest city recycle bin and grab a few bottles. There’s probably going to be a learning curve for me, and meanwhile the hummies are fussing but still using my feeder. I just can’t seem to find the nest, I have a gut feeling it’s on my house somewhere. Dangit.
Hi Mary, It is interesting to read your comment and your efforts to find something more attractive to paper wasps. Would you mind sharing if you find any alternative?
Thanks
Here’s a PDF of where the PhD mentioned in this article is at with there work:
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4450/10/7/200/pdf