The Great New Zealand Wasp Hunt

Time to save our butterflies!

October 2025

German wasp queen

One of the German wasps I failed to kill last month turned out to be a queen. If I had been able to take her out, that would have stopped a new nest establishing that would have produced around 12,000 workers (I am not joking) and 1,500 new queens. Whilst we have probably missed the peak time to take out the queens (see Landcare's illustration below), both vespula wasps and paper wasps are just starting to build nests, so numbers are low. This means every wasp killed now saves hundreds of native insects that would have otherwise been fed to wasp larvae, including butterfly and moth caterpillars.

Because the queen I had seen seemed interested in the tui sugar water on the bird table, I put out a number of slightly differing sugar-based baits in home-made bottle traps. None of them caught any wasps, so I am going to try some protein-based traps and I will report back. Hopefully the scarcity of food in the environment will help trap them. I believe that the traps are only really effective at the beginning and end of the wasp season, when queens are active and wasp numbers are low. We'll see what happens.

The trees beyond the deck are a favourite wasp spot

Paper wasps are not attracted to any bait, which means they need to be caught manually, and this may prove the most effective way of catching the vespula wasps too at this time of year. I use cheap kids fishing nets to scoop them out of the air. On a warm day they are fast, but at the start and end of the day when things are cooler, you have more of an advantage.

Another way to target the paper wasps is to find the nests and destroy them. Believe me when I say that they can spring up anywhere from low- to high-level sites where there is some protection from wind - in trees, plant pots, house eaves. Below is the European paper wasp that somehow was able to start a nest in the boot of my car. IN MY CAR! I found out when I was loading up with plants from a hardware store last weekend. I had to use one of those multi-use supermarket shopping bags to squash it, because there was no way I was driving home knowing there was a European paper wasp in the car with me.

The more conventional way of taking these nests out is to wait until dusk, when the adults are back at the nest for the night but you can still see, and then spray with fly spray. Come back later and destroy the nest so it cannot be reused.

IN MY CAR!!!!!

I feel no guilt killing non-native wasps, unlike the other invasive predators that I cull. There is a great sense of satisfaction when I step on one, knowing that another caterpillar might just make it to adulthood and become a butterfly rather than be pillaged by the wasp I've just killed. Last year was such a bad year for monarch butterflies in particular, because it was a bumper wasp year, at least around Auckland. I've already seen monarchs in the garden this spring and I don't want these to be the only ones I spot until the end of the wasp season. It's time to act!

Let the great New Zealand wasp hunt commence!