Do Wasps Damage Houses? (Solved & Explained!)

Wasps can only cause minor material damage to your home. Wasps can creep into your home through holes in your home’s exterior or a gap in your roof. This can lead to damage to your roof tiles or garden shed panels.

How Will a Wasp’s Nest Damage My House?

The wasp’s nest doesn’t usually cause any damage to your home. Any damage to your home or belongings is because of wasp behavior.

Wasps like wood and tend to chew on any wooden furniture in your home. They usually do this more often when they are knitting their nests or during their spawning season.

Wood damage can also occur if the nest has been left for a long time. Wasps have a habit of building nests in wooden beams, and the nest will absorb moisture from the wood. 

How Serious Is The Threat Of Damage to My Home?

The extent of the damage that wasps do to your home depends on how long the nest is left undisturbed. Fibers from the nest can damage wood over time, and the humidity given off from the nest can affect the paint on the walls.

Otherwise, wasps do minimal damage. So, the most important point you should pay attention to is your health. 

Wasps are more dangerous than bees. If you discover a wasp nest, call local pest control to remove it immediately, not so much because of damage to your house but to protect yourself and family members.

Early Signs of Wasps Inside Your Home

If you’ve been seeing wasps frequently inside your home, take a cautious look around to see if you can spot a nest.

Wasps are more abundant in the summer months when the population is at its highest level. During these months, wasps will go out in search of food by daylight and return when it gets dark. So if you have a nest lurking somewhere, the height of summer is when you will begin to realize.

If you suspect that there is a nest in your house,  follow the route and the sound of the wasps. Since they usually go to their nests in groups, the sound of a swarm will help you find the nest.

Do Wasps Damage Walls?

Wasps cause minor damage to your walls because of the small nests they build on the inside or outside of the plasterboard or brick.

There are sprays available that will destroy wasps that have settled in the wall, but if the nest is any larger than a golf ball it is advised to call professional pest control.

What Happens If You Leave a Wasp Nest?

Wasps can have some benefits. They contribute to pollination and destroy harmful pests in your garden and house.

However, If you leave a wasp nest, it can damage the walls and wood inside your house. If you leave a nest until winter, all the wasps will die off, but the vacant nest may be resettled in spring.

Why Are Wasps Attracted to My House?

The biggest reason wasps choose to nest in homes is because they seek a safe haven.

If they are frequently settling in yours, it may be because you live close to a natural environment, and they have easy access. 

Cracks and holes in the walls of your home, and the spaces between the roof tiles, are great places for wasps to enter and make their nests.

Should I Kill Wasps In My House?

Do not attempt to kill the wasps inside a nest. A wasp nest has between 25 and 100 wasps inside. Even if you use the most powerful solvent you can find, some wasps will escape and they will be in full attack mode.

Wasps are very dangerous insects. The venom they carry is similar to snake venom and can cause a whole host of health issues, not just the pain of a sting. Enough wasps stings can be fatal.

Wasp nests should only be removed by professional teams who know how to safely remove them from your home.

Do Wasps Hold Grudges?

Wasps have a developed visual memory and their partial ability to remember suggests that wasps are alert to danger and remember the source of danger.

Wasps don’t hold grudges like us humans, but they can potentially associate you with danger, which has a similar outcome. 

However, even if they do remember you, wasps only demonstrate an ability for short-term memory, so they are likely to hold a grudge for only a week or so before forgetting entirely.

Do Wasps Remember You?

Wasps have a very advanced brain structure compared to other insects.

Instead of recognizing pictures as a whole, they have a brain structure that processes them in parts, which gives them memory ability by recalling fragments of memory data.

Research suggests that this process applies to recognizing human faces. Although their memory is short-term they have the ability to remember you for a few days or a week. 

If you make contact with the same wasps regularly then they will become accustomed to you and remember you for longer.

What Happens If You a Kill Queen Wasp?

Killing the queen leads to the collapse of the hive – technically. So, if you have a nest in your house and you think that killing the queen is an option, then you may want to reconsider.

If you kill the queen the outcome for you is that will be the primary target of all the wasps in the hive. The outcome for the hive depends on the time of year the queen dies.

The queen wasp is responsible for ensuring the continuation of the wasps. She is of significant importance to the hive to continue further generations.

If the queen dies at the end of the summer the hive will operate unchanged. At this point, most infants have been born and so long as they have worker wasps to keep them alive then they will grow and the cycle continues.

If the queen dies in spring, then the other wasps will choose a successor, if one is available. If not then the hive will eventually die out after one generation.

Why Do I Keep Finding Queen Wasps In My House?

If you see a wasp queen in your home, she is either looking for protection from predators, trying to find a place to hibernate, or she is looking to build a nest.