Wasp Nest Removal Stretford

Stretford hands us two quite different jobs, often on the same afternoon. Around Longford Park — the old grounds of John Rylands’ house — and on the roads off Edge Lane and Cromwell Road, the housing is large Victorian and Edwardian villas with deep bracketed eaves, open rafter feet and slate roofs. Across the rest of M32, from Gorse Hill through to Kings Road and the streets off Barton Road, it is 1930s bay-fronted semis almost the whole way. The wasps behave identically in both. Reaching them is what differs.

Where we find nests in Stretford

• Boxed soffits on the inter-war semis. The soffit board was nailed to the rafter feet and butted up against the fascia, and ninety years of movement has opened that joint by a few millimetres. That is all a queen needs in April. It is the single most common nest site in M32.
• The bay-roof junction. Where the small pitched roof over the front bay meets the brickwork, the flashing lifts and wasps get into the void between the bay ceiling and the felt. People usually hear it before they see it, as a dry rustling above the front room.
• Bracketed eaves on the villas near Longford Park. Decorative timber brackets and open rafter ends give a colony a long run of dry, sheltered space. The nest often sits two or three metres back from the hole you can see, so the treatment goes in on a lance rather than at the entry point alone.
• Cladding fitted over original timber. Plenty of M32 frontages were over-clad in UPVC in the eighties and nineties without the old boards being stripped out first. The void left behind is deep and warm, and we open a surprising number of them.
• Gorse Hill terraces. The older terraces towards Trafford Park share a continuous roofline, so a colony can sit over a party wall and come and go from next door’s gutter. We always ask what the neighbours are seeing.
• Ground nests on the open land. Stretford Meadows, Turn Moss and the dry banks along the Bridgewater Canal towpath are full of old rodent burrows, and from August we get steady calls to nests in garden banking backing onto them.

You do not need to work out which of these it is. If you can stand in the garden and point at the spot the wasps keep returning to, we can trace the rest on arrival.

Price of a visit

£60, fixed, for a wasp nest anywhere in M32. Hornets are wasps as far as the treatment goes, so a hornet nest is the same £60 — worth saying, because they alarm people a good deal more than they need to. The fee covers the visit, the treatment and a free return if anything is still flying after a couple of days. There is no call-out charge and no premium for a Saturday.

Bumblebees are £70, but tell us on the phone if that is what you have. Bumblebee colonies are small, they rarely trouble anyone, and they finish naturally by early autumn — in most Stretford gardens the sensible course is to leave them alone, and we will say so rather than book a job you do not need. Honeybees we do not treat at all. If a swarm has settled on a fence post or in a tree, a local beekeeper may collect it.

Booking a Stretford visit

Ring 07770 015197. A morning call will normally get a same-day slot somewhere in M32, and it helps if you can say which elevation the wasps are working — front bay, back eaves, gable end — so the right ladder comes off the van first time.