Dear WO'N: You don't need any damned helicopter to get rid of wasps. Just like bees, they will feed on sugar water laced with insecticide and take it back and wipe out the colony. Of course it also wipes out bees in the area, so any in hives would have to be removed. I used to keep bees, and worked with an old timer putting hives on cranberry bogs to pollinate the crop. He didn't even wear a head net, and he would get over a hundred stings before he even expressed annoyance. When bees sting, backward pointing teeth on stinger prevents bees from removing stinger, leaving little white poison sac, with smooth muscle still contracting and relaxing to pump venom into wound. He often had more poison sacs than hairs on his pate. Wasps can sting repeatedly, and their venom hurts worse. When I was about four years old, my mother took me blueberry picking. A path I wanted to go through was blocked by an old newspaper draped over a small bush. I gave it a kick and went through. It was a paper wasp nest bigger than a basketball, and I was clad only in bathing trunks. I got hundreds of stings. Never again did I go blueberry picking.
Wasps are also easily killed by just the fine droplets of petroleum base of sprays. They breathe through very fine tubes called spiracles which get clogged by the spray, so the wasp dies very quickly from lack of oxygen.
