The other day my oldest son came in the house with his younger brother and claimed they had found a hornets nest. They found it up in the trees near our turkey coop and they both were excited and hoping I would cut it down for them.
Looking for and harvesting hornets nests is sort of a fall tradition around these parts. As the temps drop, the hornets begin to die off and you can safely harvest the nest without fear of being attacked. WHY? The nests are worth money and people will pay you for them so they can put them on display. Also, they can win blue ribbons every year at the county fair and that was more on the mind of my older son.
Hornets themselves can be sold if you capture them quick enough after the freeze. There are laboratories that will purchase female hornets and pay you for them. They harvests the stingers and venom and use them to develop allergy shots for severe attacks on those who are allergic to the bee or hornet venom. Some people actually make a living on harvesting the hornets part time during the summer and fall. But you need to learn the difference between the females and male drones. Only the females carry the venom.
The homestead has had a couple of hard freezes with temp drops down in the mid to upper 20's. So I felt pretty safe to harvest the nest and bring the boys along to watch and help. The temps during the harvest were going to be in the low 60's so just in case, I left my youngest son in the truck.
Here is the nest as seen from the side of our road on the property. Can you see it?
The nest was up in a very small tree and would take much to cut it down. So I got the chainsaw and Joshua grabbed a hold of the tree to keep it from falling over after I made the cut.
As we lowered the tree, the bottom of the nest caught against a nearby tree and ripped part of the bottom. Just a little damage. Now that the nest is on the ground, we need to carefully cut the bottom and top of the tree away leaving us only the section where the nest is attached.
With the nest separated from the tree, we carefully removed the damaged section from the bottom and revealed something most people will never see, the inside of a bald hornets nest. These guys are some of the meanest insects in the forest. And wouldn't you know it, there were a few actually still alive in the nest looking back up at us.
They were looking at us very angry having disturbed their nest but because of the cold temps, they didn't have the energy to do anything about it. Carefully we moved the nest back to the house and began to slowing take away the rest of the bottom and remove debris (with needle nosed pliers) and the remaining hornets that seemed to be alive.
The next step was to put a coating of shellac to harden the outside a bit and keep it durable. They say you don't have to do this but it really makes a difference in the durability of the nest. By itself, it really is fragile.
That's it! We will keep it outside a bit longer to make SURE that all the hornets are dead. We have some more freezing temps coming up so that should finish the rest of them off.
Have you ever harvested a hornets nest? Did you keep it? Let us know the details in the comments below!
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