Underground Yellow Jackets

I've been working on killing a couple of underground yellow jacket hives for the past week.  I finally had success with the one near the lilac bush, and am still fighting one near the back of the barn.

We didn't see any bees (yellow jackets, actually, but I'll just call them bees) at the lilac bush nest yesterday, so I decided to take a shovel and dig out one scoop last night.  Then I ran away very quickly.

And today, we still didn't see any bees, so we believed they were all dead or gone.  Being curious, I thought I would do some digging (yes - literal digging).  I dug up the following:

The top of a hive!

Chunks of a hive!

 The hive removed.

Closeup of my dead bees.

Yup - all the bees were dead.  I saw one or two bees walking around kind of funny, and on the verge of death.  As a side note, we were surprised at how bad it all smelled.  It smelled like a dead animal sitting in the sun for many days - rotten flesh.  Ugh.

My method for killing them over the past week involved many ounces of Sevin powder, gasoline, and fire.  I believe the Sevin powder was the key - only one out of the many chunks of the hive appeared to have any fire damage.

Tonight, we piled all the dead bees and chunks of the hive back in the hole, and had one last Bee BBQ.  Tomorrow, I'll fill in the hole and plant some grass seed.  Thereafter, I'll concentrate on my last yellow jacket hive behind the barn.  No gasoline, because it is 2 inches from the foundation.