The Most Successful, Non-Violent Wasp Trap

Alright alright, I do realize it's winter time in Northern Europe but there has been this majorly successful undertaking involving a heap of wasps and how we got rid of them that I want to finally write about. Better late than never right?

Not sure if you ever found yourself in a place with a ton of wasps but if you have I am sure you can relate when I say: It's a pest. It's hard to see any merit with wasps if you live in a space with hundreds and thousands of them over a week, and even the most peaceful and tolerant human being will eventually freak out because they're just everywhere, and they often seem aggressive to a degree that is quite challenging. Unreasonably aggressive. They fly into anything human beings are consuming, you have to literally double check your drink any time you consider taking a sip. Food of all types can easily attract them in groups and even foods that seem unintuitive draw them out of nowhere.

We were particularly shocked when we saw how much they seem to dig dead animal - anything coming from the BBQ of our neighbors' camp was an outright magnet to them and we were all really surprised.

Add to their persistency and quantity the fact that we were at a psychedelic festival where it's pretty much a given that one will eventually go through expanded states of consciousness and it can become quite the hazard to know that countless wasps are in your camp, underneath the tent zipper and in the trash bags. It's somewhat of an uneasy, subliminal gnawing at your state of mind, especially if you are allergic to wasps and need to make sure you don't have a bad encounter with them.

So naturally - being hippies and all - we wanted to find a way to get the wasps out of our camp. A humane way. Not only that killing wasps seemed totally at odds with living a violence-free lifestyle we were so adamant about (it is self-understood that killing things for mere convenience is NOT the way to go), the sheer number of wasps seemed insurmountable.

The problem was that we were drawing them to our camp by simply living there.

So on lsd we eventually figured we needed a better, even more enticing magnet for them than our camp. We started trying out all sorts of things to divert them from our camp.

We started with sugary stuff - juices, mixed beers, liquors with lots of sugar. But the thing is that wasps will not stop in time, they will dive into the liquid and eventually drown, which defeated the purpose of us trying to not kill them.

One of our friends tried all sorts of food during the week - the vegan rice dish from one of the shops (he left a little bit over from his meal to try it out) - didn't work as well as we thought it should. Sure it drew some of them but the majority simply didn't go for it.

So eventually, out of sheer frustration with our failed experiments I decided to throw them an apple - bit of half of the thing to expose a lot of juicy surface and I threw the thing away from our camp where no other tents were located.

Imagine my surprise when we eventually noticed that the wasps had stopped coming to our camp - the very same day. I had almost forgotten about the apple but then remembered when one of my friends asked what we had done to finally get them out of our camp, so I went and checked it out.

It was a BALL OF WASPS!

Literally the entire exposed surface area was CRAWLING with wasps. If you have a wasp phobia this might be quite tough to witness, but man was it interesting. They were crawling over one another, the apple was teeming with them in a most unsettling manner.

Among all the things we tried, a plain old regular half-eaten apple was the most successful of all the things we had tried BY FAR** and it lasted a long time to! I only gave them another half-eaten apple in the second half of the week and our camp stayed pretty much wasp-free for the remainder of the festival - to the amazement of the visitors that came to our camp.

So, if you ever find yourself in a place with wasps and they are anything like the aggressive ones in Leeuwarden Netherlands during late August - do try an apple! It just beat all the other ideas we came up with by leaps and bounds...

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