... is what the yellow jackets must tell each other at night before they go to sleep, like kids sharing ghost stories. Really, that's the only explanation I've got for this behavior.
This was a brand new yellow jacket trap, replacing the old one I had hanging in the same spot. I hadn't added the water yet so the bait pill wasn't dissolved which means there was no sweet odor to attract them.
Further, no yellow jacket who went into the old bag ever came back out.
I'm convinced they were all there to see if the ghost stories about the bag were true. How else could they know they were supposed to go to it?
Similar Arthropodic Topic: My ant Starbucks are still at work, but haven't shown any results yet. In fact, I opened two new franchises in the cotton patch. The company who makes the stakes says that it can take up to two weeks to wipe out an ant infestation. I've still got two more ant Starbucks to deploy. If I don't see some decline in the mass of ants, I'm going to put them into the patch this afternoon.
1 comment:
Actually, I think those funnel traps are only about 80% effective at catching insects, some fraction of them do manage to walk down the funnel sides, go back around the tip, and escape. This might even be an intentional design feature, you might catch more wasps overall if some of them get out to lure in their nestmates, than if you just depend on the odor to lure them in.
For that matter, wasps have a really good sense of smell, they may very well smell the pellet even when it is dry, even if we can't.
And then, as you say, there are the ghost stories.
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