Wasp and hornet trapping update

And I find another new wasp, genus Paralastor

November 2025

I mentioned at the start of the month that I was continuing to put out wasp traps since there were hornets identified in the area. I have finally seen both a Biosecurity staff member and a couple of MPI traps in Birkdale over the last couple of days. It is in poor comparison to the fruit fly outbreak where there were hoards of staff going door to door, large signs on the main roads and an instant, targeted response. However, MPI have finally gained momentum and the next steps seem reasonable and useful. The latest, as of 17 November, is there have been 10 queens and 2 workers found, plus one photographed in Glenfield and Birkdale. None have been in the network of baited traps they have put out and that makes me feel a lot better about my trapping success.

MPI hornet trap

Is catching one vespula wasp in a couple of traps success? Perhaps if they are queens. Not so much if they are workers. I have not yet got a handle on recognising a queen from a worker. They look the same, but the queen is bigger. Hopefully someone on iNaturalist will be able to tell me. However, catching a couple of wasps in traps is better than catching no wasps in traps, so perhaps the latest lure recipes are working better. They are actually hornet recipes, but they have attracted both a German wasp and a common wasp in, which is more than the earlier sugar, water and vinegar recipes did.

The first was caught in a store-bought trap in which I had mixed beer, white wine and grape juice (this is a hornet recipe from France, after all) . The second was caught in a home-made trap with a similar recipe of beer, strawberry fruit syrup (the French recipe called for red fruit syrup and that's all I could get) and white wine. MPI has now put out their own guidance for home made hornet traps, which uses a yeast-based recipe that was circulated on Facebook early on by a conservationist. We don't have yeast, but we did have an open bottle of wine to finish up! Not cheap, no, but certainly cheaper than some of the successful industrial-scale lures.

I spotted this post on Facebook from the Whakatane Kiwi Trust, who have successfully caught over 2,000 queen vespula wasps so far this season. That is AMAZING and will make a fundamental difference to the area in which they are working. Wow!

They use NoPests® Wasp Lure, which is available from Farmlands, Mitre 10 and apiary suppliers. It is in the $55-$70 mark for a litre, $150 for 5 litres. Whilst we can afford to buy beer for the traps, which is more than most can, this is pricing for large-scale enterprises, not backyards, unless a group of neighbours pitch in together. Thus, I have gone and bought some much more affordable Envirosafe European Wasp Trap Bait and we'll see how that goes. I think it works by smelling of carrion - rotting meat - which paper wasps and bees do not eat, but vespula wasps will, alongside a range of other foods.

However, it was water that brought in a new wasp to the garden this week I hadn't seen before. I was by the birdbath and saw the wasp approach the fresh water. I recognised it was something new and that it was not big enough to be a hornet, but the colouring was suspicious. Turns out these wasps can actually land on water and drink, which was a handy way to catch it in the net! The ever-reliable iNaturalist has IDed it as genus Paralastor, which is a group of potter wasps from Australia. They are solitary, not unlike the European tube wasp, which it resembles in size and shape. It was first spotted in Auckland in 2014, but is mostly found in Northland, if iNaturalist is anything to go by. It does not look like anyone has spotted one south of Auckland and there are only 22 sightings listed on iNaturalist for New Zealand to date.

Genus Paralastor

Naturally the first thing I wanted to know was what do they eat? The answer is flower nectar for the adults and caterpillars for their larvae. So this is yet another wasp that could affect our native moth and butterfly populations if it gets more established. These smaller wasps take less protein than the social wasps, but certainly in this part of New Zealand where the non-native wasps are entrenched, every caterpillar is precious.

Now, drumroll, the pièce de résistance of home-made hornet and wasp traps. I reckon I have tried a trap that no one else has tried locally - a UV light trap and with additional lures of cat food and sugar/fruit. And that didn't catch any wasps or hornets either!

I was reading a Canadian blog about different UV lights for attracting moths at home and it mentioned about some of them attracting hornets as well. With a bit more Googling I found that wasps are attuned to UV light, helping them spot flowers for nectar. Allegedly (perhaps I should put that in italics) ALLEGEDLY they are incredibly attracted to UV light. Well, I tried a daytime UV set up using my moth trap light, and nothing turned up all day. Nothing.

Homemade UV wasp and hornet trap

The idea of a wasp trap is that it is catching wasps when you are not around, but for me it is still more effective to catch the wasps with a net and stomp on them. The same day as I emptied the traps, I caught several European paper wasps, an Asian paper wasp and a German wasp with the net in a short space of time. If you can't find the nests, this is proving the next best thing for getting them. At $2-$5 for a kids net, it is a lot more affordable than beer and wine!