Help your local bees this spring
Spring Is Here—And It’s Time to Help Our Local Bees
With spring arriving in Seattle, you might start noticing more insects out and about—including yellow jackets, or better their larger sized queens. What many people don’t realize is that this early spring moment is when yellow jacket queens are waking up and looking for a place to start a new nest, which will produce large numbers of what in private I call “Flying Assholes”.
This is also the best time to stop a problem before it starts.
Here in Ballard, keeping honey bees healthy can be surprisingly difficult. Along with issues like unusually high Varroa mite concentrations our bees also face heavy pressure from predatory wasps later in the year. This is why Ballard is also known as the Bee Death Zone to local beekeepers. By late summer and fall, yellow jackets can become aggressive and often attack beehives—killing bees and taking their honey. Yellow jacket wasps are carnivorous and have been known to overrun and consume an entire bee colony in a matter of hours!
It can be heartbreaking for a beekeeper to lose a hive this way, especially after a full season of care.
Why Spring Trapping Matters
Each Yellow Jackey queen you catch in spring prevents an entire colony from developing. A single colony can grow to thousands of wasps by late summer, when bee colonies have already naturally shrunk in size over the summer and are at their most vulnerable. So stopping just one queen early makes a big difference.
That’s why spring trapping is so important. It’s simple, effective, and something anyone can do to help.
A Community Effort
Bees don’t stay in one yard—they travel throughout the neighborhood. Bees visit flowers and blooms in a 2 mile circle radius from their homes. For example, my bees in the Crown Hill area travel throughout Ballard, Phinney Ridge, Greenwood and further. That means keeping them healthy is truly a community effort. The more we can reduce stressors like mites and predatory wasps, the better chance our local pollinators have to thrive and make it over the winter.
Even if you’re not a beekeeper, you can still play an important role.
Other Challenges for Bees
You might assume cold weather is the biggest danger to bees in winter, but in Seattle it’s actually moisture. Beekeepers strive to keep hives dry and well-ventilated so bees can make it through our long, damp winters. We use quilt boxes and winter boards made from absorbent material under the hive roofs that trap excess condensation from upwards rising bee respiration.
Parasitic Varroa Mites are also a big problem in Seattle, as they can weaken and eventually kill the bees they are attached to. Come fall many beekeepers find that a sudden increase of dead bees on the bottom board is often a sign of poor mite control. Which is the reason to medicate your bees seasonally to keep your hives thriving and healthy.
Bee colonies need a large enough winter bee population to survive. When it gets cold out, bees stop leaving the hive below 50 degrees Fahrenheit other than to poop on sunny days. To conserve heat the worker bees will ball up around the queen to keep her warm and fed until she starts laying eggs again come spring.
As beekeepers we can make sure the bees have enough food stores, are properly medicated for mites and will stay dry despite the Seattle Monsoon season.
By contrast, protecting bees from predators in late summer and fall is much harder—which is why taking action now, in spring, is so valuable.
How You Can Help
Setting out a simple wasp trap in your yard this spring can help reduce yellow jacket populations later in the year. Keeping well managed traps in your yard through summer and early fall adds even more protection.
It’s a small step that can make a real difference for bees, gardens, and the overall health of our local environment.
If you’d like to help, check out our quick guide below on how to trap yellow jacket queens safely and effectively.
Yellow Jackets Traps That Work
The best commercially available Yellow Jacket traps (by Rescue, Terro and Advantage) are reusable, and use scent lures that are highly effective. This means these traps work without insecticides, making them safe around your family and pets, and they do not affect our common pollinators and bees.
The cheaper version is a quick and simple DYI project you can work on with your kids, a teaching moment for folks large and small. And instead of using artificial pheromones to attract the wasps, the best lures are found in your trash! For a DIY plan and more information see below.
