Where’s The Beef…Yellow Jackets

As soon as that juicy steak, or burger, or hot dogs, or any other meat hits the grill of your barbeque, all the meat bees in the vicinity will be asking this question: Where’s the beef? Then they’ll use their super spidey-senses to sniff it out, and then it is game on.

Meat Bees

Meat bees, also known as yellow jackets, aren’t actually bees at all. They, along with almost 5,000 other wasp species, belong to the super-fancily named Vespidae family. Now, this bug blogger isn’t quite sure what the person who named them “bees” was smokin’, but at least they got the meat part right. They love that meat. Big time. And once their sights are set on your steak, there’s not much that will deter them. In fact, they are so determined to get to it that they’ll become aggressive in their pursuit and can bite and sting like the best of them. In fact, the pain from a sting not only hurts like a mother but has been described as injecting fire into your flesh. That’s a hard pass for me.

Meat bees workers measure about 12 millimeters long or half an inch. The queen is bigger and spans all of 19 millimeters or 3/4 of an inch. They make their nests in holes in the ground, in trees, rodent burrows, under the eaves of homes, and several other places. They continue to grow their nests as their colony grows and their numbers increase.

Enough with all the technical meat bee mumbo jumbo, blah, blah, blah. If there are  meat bees getting in the way of you enjoying your New York strips, you need a way to get rid of them. And fast.

How To Get Rid of Yellow Jackets

So, what to do?

One thing that proves to be effective is keeping your food indoors. This defeats the purpose of having a BBQ, but it will solve the problem.

Some say to cook with less meat and more vegetables. I say, why bother firing up the grill if there’s not a big chunk of meat on it. Besides, even though they are named after their favorite meal, meat isn’t the only thing that attracts them. They love sweets, and fruit, and soda, too. They have a keen sense of smell that allows them to pick up the scent of their favorite foods from afar. All this to say that switching to a meatless BBQ does not mean you are out of the woods with the meat bees.

If sharing your meat or sweets or sweet meats with meat bees is not your jam, click HERE to check out the meat bee insecticide sprays that HowToPest.com has available. Finding the nest and treating it properly will give you the freedom to eat that juicy steak without the threat of being bitten, stung, or having to share it with unwanted pests.

Make sure you are the only one asking where the beef is when you fire up your grill!