Well, they're not as long or long waisted, so relatively, yeah.  Yellow jackets have a bunch of species though and not all of them are ground nesters.  And ground nesters don't always ground nest if there's a handy cavity like a log or wall cavity.  But yeah, there's lots of yellow striped paper wasps in TX.

Yellow jackets nest wherever.

No shit. I've seen a shit ton of Yellow Jacket nests above ground.

In my neck of the woods those are called paper wasps. 


A yellow jacket would be like this. 

Attached File

Fire, duh.

I had some nesting in a hollowed out tree, about 6 feet up.  Shot a whole can of Spectracide wasp killer in there and they came out like nothing I'd ever seen.  It was like one of those killer bee documentaries in the early 2000s.  Hundreds of them.  

Hundreds became dozens.  Dozens became a few.  They flew around passed off and were just dropping midflight from the spray.  Wish I would have had the foresight to take a video.

THIS

My buddy's a beekeeper, and said use Dawn soap/H2O. I thought it was crazy. But after doing honey bee removals with him, figured WTF.
My neighbor had 2 huge (or 1) hive in the ground, right off the front porch. The house is nicely landscaped, , and didn't want to poison the ground around the area with petroleum based products.

We hooked the garden hose to a hot water supply, (utility sink spigot had a threaded end) and had full bottles of dawn soap.
We "plugged" both holes with 4' piece's of 2" PVC pipe...large funnel on the open end.
Started pouring the pre-mixed hot soap solution down the PVC.
We had 2,  5 gallon buckets of HOT soapy water to start the initial pour....hose/soap ready to follow up the initial pour.
This is done at dark/ cooler part of an evening.
We were wearing bee keeper jackets, gloves, boots, duct taped pant legs...etc
We threw it to them, and by the time we ran out of 2 LG jugs of Dawn soap...the ground was bubbling.
The soap is a surfactant, allowing you to essentially drown the hive. Don't skimp with the solution, let them have it.
In the morning all that was left we're a couple of crawling wasps, on their deat bed.
There we're thousands of dead ones in the grass. No return of them, no loss of landscaping, or the smell of gasoline...etc.
Hopefully this makes sense,  as it's been a long day...and I'm trying to keep this straightforward.

You can tell those are paper wasps by the lack of an outer wall enclosing the nest and by the orange antennae and leg parts.  It's funny what you notice when you look down to see one grinding its ass against your thumb knuckle.  But yeah, we call those yellow jackets in TX too.  I don't find them much less aggressive than the true ones.  

I've always had good luck with the Foaming Spray... or the Gasoline solution.

THERE WILL BE A SECOND HOLE, which they come pouring out of ready to fuck your life up, they also sometimes leave "guards".

Timely.

I'm just coming out of a weeks-long battle against red wasps that found a hole in the corner of the eaves of the house and were nesting somewhere up in the attic.  I tried virtually all of the over-the-counter stuff, and while it kills the ones you see, if you can't get to the nest they just keep on coming and you'll go broke buying spray to kill them off onesie-twosies.

What finally appears to have worked was a DIY mixture of 50/50 water and vinegar, with about a teaspoon of mint extract and a little Dawn as a surfactant. Don't know that it kills them, but it makes them go away... apparently they can't stand the smell of the mint. Was still seeing a few here and there, so I added another spoonful of a wormwood infusion to the mix (yah, just happened to have some... wife is an herb gardener).  That seems to have pretty much cleared them out entirely.

I topped off a ground wasp nest with this once time.  Let me tell you, watching them emerge covered in the dust and drop out of the sky in mass is very satisfying.

They are not the same wasp.

Ground nesters and paper nest builders are different animals, as are mud nest builders and there are paper nest builders that are not yellow striped. (I think)

There is a shitload of different wasps, all of which are different from bees, but people use the same words for lots of different things, which ultimately confuses the shit out of everybody.

I tried the gasoline thing but it didn't work.

I just used this, Spectracide Pro, on the ones in my retaining wall and no more yellowjackets. It works.

Just found a big ass Ground nest by our apartment building. The wasps have like 4 or 5 different enterances they're flying into. And I would guess maybe 6 or 7 feet between the two farthest points. I ain't getting a tape measurer. LOL.

Dunno how to go about killing the fuckers.