Main Menu
Have you had a good experience with Pest Purge? We’d love it if you could leave us a Google review! Click here to leave your review.
Wasps are presently overwintering here in the UK, or at least the Queen is, hibernating in a warm nest in aloft somewhere nearby. In spring she will emerge and set off to start a new colony somewhere new. In Australia it is their summer and the wasp season is fully underway with wasps busy building nests everywhere.
If she happens to be near an airport she will find plenty of redundant aircraft and opportunities for new nesting sites. Keyhole wasps, one of the 110,000 species there are, have been shown to build nests in critical plane parts that measure the airspeed of planes. Blockages in pitot tubes can make pilots misread airspeed and have led to fatal crashes. A research team in Australia have been studying these wasps at Brisbane airport over a three year period.
The research was triggered by a real safety incident where a plane had to land soon after departing because the pilots recognised an airspeed discrepancy. A blocked pitot tube was responsible, wasps had nested inside. The team 3d printed replica pitot tubes and put them up around the airport, they found that 93 were fully blocked by wasps over a period of 3 years.
Now when planes land they cover these tubes to keep the wasps out. Hopefully the authorities know about this at our airports!
