In the garden we have several fig trees. These are reasonably attractive, and one of them provides a good amount of shelter for the seating area of one of the holiday gites we have here. We also have an ancient orchard – peaches mainly, and a few apples, pears and nectarines. Doesn’t that sound nice? In the summer we can amble over to the orchard before breakfast and pluck fruit straight off the tree. Yum.
This is nice for us, and also nice for people who come on holiday here, since for many people a fresh fig straight off the tree is a new experience, and they are completely delicious. We haven’t really found a good way of storing figs, and our efforts at drying them in the sunshine (or a low oven) have been a failure so far, but I am sure we will master this in due course.
But as we have found, and as you will know, every pleasure has a cost. And I am not talking of the problems of eating too many figs, a problem you are probably already aware of. I am talking of hornets.
If you don’t know hornets, well, lucky you. They look pretty much like a regular wasp, except they are two-three times as big. Trust me, they are big. People that say ‘I think I saw a hornet, but perhaps it was a big wasp’ have almost certainly seen a big wasp. I can’t see how you could confuse the two.
Hornets are very docile, and not at all irritating like wasps can be. They don’t buzz around your head and land on your lunch, and they make such a loud buzzing as they fly that you are always aware of them. So hornets are also not a big problem.
But they do have three important attributes. They are very attracted to light (so if you leave a window open at night with a light on they will enter in their droves). They love the taste of overripe figs. And their stings are very toxic -just a few stings at the same time can apparently be fatal.
The first problem can be tackled with fly screens, so that’s not too bad. If you have a closed window, the hornets are so desperate to get at the light that they will batter noisily against the glass until they die from exhaustion, which seems a curious evolutionary mechanism but doesn’t do any harm to the startled spectators.
The second problem – the hornets love of figs – is why I am writing this now rather than August. There is a short period at the moment, when you can see the baby figs on the trees, but the leaves have not yet grown. So it is a two week window of opportunity to quickly and easily remove most of the figs. That is what I have just been doing. Some remain of course – we still want figs, just not an impossibly huge amount – but in principle I think this will solve the problem.
The third problem, that of their stings being so dangerous, should therefore be avoided. Every year we become aware of the hornets and where they are nesting only a week or two before their numbers increase dramatically (they are only an issue during late August and early September) and of course we call in the exterminators as soon as we can.
So with this three-pronged approach, this year I am optimistic we won’t see them at all. I will report back in September.
Hornets.
I was told that until recently, if a hornets’ nest was reported on your property, the local pompiers could visit and exterminate, without your permission or knowledge, even if you weren’t at the property. This happened to us before we lived here full-time (in the Mayenne), and the pompiers removed stones from a wall and left a right mess. They weren’t obliged to make good their damage, of course. And they didn’t. I believe this task is no longer required of them.
Anyway, my enquiry is this. We have frelons again this year; they buzz around the place and come in through any open window. They either leave when requested to do so, or they get a headache from my tennis racquet, or an aerosol blast. Either option is a tad final for the hornet concerned.
I know where their nest is – nest? Home. Abode. They come and go through a crack high up in the front facade of the house, between the stones. It’s much to high to accurately squirt an aerosol from the ground.
So I propose to arm myself with a spray-in mousse of poisonous gunk from Bricomarche, and go up a ladder (when it’s a lot colder and the frelons have retired for the winter) and give them a long and hopefully lethal squirt from the mousse can. I will then make a rapid retreat back down the ladder, and wait. If there’s no activity for a few hours, I propose to go back up the ladder with a bucket of rapid-setting mortar, and bung as much as I can into the hornet access and egress crack.
Would anyone care to comment on my strategy? Would you do anything different or better? Answers on a postcard please – to Horace Batchelor, Keynsham. That’s K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M. Old reference, some of your readers will geddit.
We have had a hornets nest here virtually every summer we have lived here – almost always in a different place each year. The first year we called the pompiers who dealt with it very efficiently but they have withdrawn this service and now you have to get expensive proffessionals in. Consequently Mr Boris finds himself up a ladder facing a hornets nest with a can of whatever hornet nest killer we have found in brico. This is generally successful but usually takes a few gos and the cans are not cheap! The hornets die in the winter so if you are waiting anyway for the winter just wait until a few cold nights have killed them off and then seal up the hole. We were told they never nest in the same place twice but they did here so best to seal up the hole as best you can to be on the safe side.
Good luck
Mrs Boris
Aha. I did not know this…frelons die in winter? They don’t hibernate and come out the next summer even bigger and badder?
So my lazybones tactic will be to simply wait them out until we’ve had the first frost, and then all I have to do is seal up the crack in the wall….this is good news. Thank you Mrs Boris.