Bat House Forum

[Terry Lobdell]

Tried something new this spring. I applied a very small amount of vaseline on the ceilings of some of my bat houses where I had wasp trouble last year. I was careful not to get it anywhere else but on the ceiling. I'm hoping it will make the surface too slippery for the wasps to attach their nests. I am going to monitor and compare crevices with and without vaseline throughout the summer.

Just wondered if anyone might have some thoughts on this type of experiment?

[Joe Spencer]

Sounds neat Terry!  How thick is the application?

[LarryH]

I'm interested in how it works.  I tried this a couple years ago on the inside of the cover on our propane tank, and the wasps just cleaned of a small space and attached their nest.  Please keep us posted on your results.

 

[Terry Lobdell]

Joe,

The thickness is maybe 1/16th of an inch. It's just enough to make the surface slippery. I had an awful time with wasps last summer and just need to keep them out more.

In 2002 I had good luck with a wasp trap made out of a 2 liter bottle. I filled it with sprite and caught 149 asian wasps (the ones that look like yellow jackets) and 10 white faced hornets. This was in about 5 weeks time. I am going to try the same thing this year and maybe try different kinds of bait.

The years of 2003 and 2004 were very wet and cool. I didn't catch many wasps and had virtually no problem with them in my bat houses. 2005 was much hotter and the wasps were bad.

Larry,

I will monitor these crevices throughout the summer and post the results!

[Terry Lobdell]

Just an update on my experiment. I have noticed a few wasps in the crevices with the vaseline but no nests yet.

Overall, I've counted 50+  bats in 7 bat houses. The other night I counted almost 40 little browns come out of one house! I am excited because other years my numbers don't peak until late May, which means I should be getting more. I am hoping after pups are born I will have over 100 bats in 11 houses.

[LarryH]

That is good to hear, Terry!   Last evening, I was mowing the pasture when I noticed the bats were starting to emerge.  So, I turned off the tractor and watched them.  I counted 72 bats, both Big Brown and Little Brown emerge from the two houses.  I'm sure I missed a few of them, though, since they were coming out so fast.   I was happy to see so many of them so early in the year.  That is more than I saw at any time last summer.  But, we've had an exceptionally early and warm summer -- the June Bugs are already out, and I have seen the Big Browns getting the June Bugs under the mercury vapor light on the end of the garage.  

I hope we have a good population of pups this year, too, and the number of bats increase even more as summer goes on.