If someone has just been stung
Check the person before you think about the nest.
Local pain, redness, and swelling at the sting site are normal, even if the swelling is dramatic. What is not normal is anything happening away from the sting: trouble breathing, tightness in the throat, swelling of the lips or tongue, hives spreading across the body, dizziness, a weak pulse, or fainting.
That is anaphylaxis, and MedlinePlus describes it plainly — it “can begin very quickly, and symptoms may be life-threatening.” The instruction is equally plain: “If someone is having a serious allergic reaction, call 911. If an auto-injector is available, give the person the injection right away.”
Use the auto-injector first, then call. Do not wait to see if it gets worse.
Identify the insect before you dial — it decides the phone number
This is the one category where the wrong identification means the wrong trade, and the trades genuinely will not take each other’s work. Two minutes of looking saves a wasted call-out.
Paper wasp. Slender, long dangling legs in flight, and an open umbrella-shaped grey comb you can see the cells of, tucked under an eave, a rail, or inside a grill. Smallest colonies, least defensive. → DIY or pest control.
Yellow jacket, aerial. Short, stocky, bright yellow and black, fast. Nest is a fully enclosed grey papery ball or hidden in a soffit, shed, or wall. → Pest control.
Yellow jacket, in the ground. Same insect, a steady stream of traffic in and out of a hole in the lawn or a bank. Colonies get very large, they defend aggressively, they pursue, and mower vibration triggers them. → Pest control, and mark the hole from a distance. Fixr prices yellow jacket work at $700, the highest of any wasp type they list.
Bald-faced hornet. Black and white rather than yellow, and the nest is the classic football or basketball-sized grey teardrop hanging from a branch or an eave. Highly defensive, and they will sting without contact. → Pest control. Fixr lists $625.
European hornet. Large, brown and yellow, and the only common one that flies at night and bangs into lit windows. Nests in hollow trees and wall voids. → Pest control.
Mud dauber. Slim, long thread waist, and small mud tubes stuck under an eave or in a garage. Solitary, docile, effectively harmless. → Nobody. Scrape the tubes off when they’re empty.
Cicada killer. Very large, striped, digging burrows in bare dry soil, often dragging a cicada. Solitary and extremely reluctant to sting. → Nobody. They’re gone in weeks.
Carpenter bee. Fat, bumblebee-like, shiny black abdomen, drilling clean round holes in bare softwood. The hovering ones are males and cannot sting. → A handyman, or you. Fill and paint the wood. Not a pest control job.
Bumblebee. Round, very fuzzy, in a small nest in the ground, a compost heap, or an old rodent burrow. Docile, small colonies, dead by autumn. → Leave it unless it’s in a doorway. Some beekeepers or wildlife groups will relocate.
Honeybee swarm. Fuzzy golden-brown, and a football-to-rugby-ball cluster hanging on a branch or fence post with no nest. Temporary — they are house-hunting and usually move on in a day or two. → A beekeeper, often free.
Honeybee colony established in a wall or chimney. Steady traffic at one gap for weeks or months, sometimes with visible wax or a damp honey stain inside. → A bee removal specialist doing cut-outs, not a swarm collector and not a standard exterminator. Fixr puts this at $800 to $1,500, because the comb and honey have to come out.
The quick field test if you can’t remember any of that: fuzzy and round means bee, smooth and narrow-waisted means wasp. Bees route to beekeepers, wasps route to pest control, and neither will take the other’s job.
Then the location decides the price and the method
Once you know what it is, where it is settles the rest.
- Exposed, under an eave or on a branch, reachable from the ground → DIY at dusk, or the cheapest professional visit.
- Above ladder height → professional. Fixr adds a height surcharge of $25 or more for nests over 10 feet, which is trivially less than a fall.
- Inside a wall, soffit, or roof void → professional with a dust applicator, then a separate trade to open and clean out. $350 to $875 at Fixr, plus that drywall patch.
- In a chimney → professional; Fixr lists $475 to $600. Cap it afterwards, once the colony is confirmed dead.
- In the ground → professional. Do not pour anything down the hole.
- Inside a utility box, meter housing, or grill → professional, and tell them what it’s in. Applying a solvent-based aerosol into an electrical enclosure is its own hazard.
- Near a door, a deck, a play area, or a window you open → treat regardless of size or season.
- Far from everything, discovered in late summer → a legitimate do-nothing. Frost ends it.
Who will refuse the job
- Beekeepers will not take wasps, hornets, or yellow jackets. They keep bees. Calling a beekeeper about a hornet nest is the most common wasted call here.
- Beekeepers will often decline an established in-wall colony too. Collecting a swarm off a branch is fifteen minutes and free bees; cutting a colony out of your siding is construction work. That is a paid cut-out specialist, and the county beekeeping association will usually name one.
- Pest control companies generally will not, and often should not, kill honeybees. Expect to be redirected.
- Most pest control companies will not open your wall or patch it. Treatment is licensed work; carpentry isn’t.
- Some will decline a roof or high-ladder job and refer you to someone with a lift.
- Your landlord’s handyman is not the right answer for an in-wall colony, for the same reason as above: treating from outside without a dust applicator can push the colony into the interior.
The DIY line
You can reasonably handle it yourself when all of these are true:
- The nest is exposed — you can see the whole thing
- You can reach it standing on the ground
- Nobody in the household has a known sting allergy
- It’s a paper wasp nest (the open, umbrella-shaped grey comb under an eave), not a football-sized enclosed hornet nest or a ground colony
- You have a jet-stream can rated to 20 feet, and a clear path back indoors
Do it at dusk or just before dawn, when the colony is home and cold. Stand upwind, aim at the entrance, soak it, and leave immediately. Re-check the next evening.
Any one of these ends the DIY conversation: it’s in a wall, soffit, roof, or chimney; it’s above ladder height; it’s a ground colony; or anyone in the house is allergic. The ladder one is worth stating plainly — people fall off ladders while being stung, and the fall is the injury, not the sting. And if you need it gone this afternoon for an event, pay the emergency surcharge, which Fixr puts at $50 to $100.
In-wall nests: the specific trap
The instinct with a nest inside a wall is to seal the entrance hole. Do not.
Wasps that cannot get out the way they came in will chew laterally and emerge through the interior drywall, into a bedroom. Professionals treat in-wall colonies with an insecticidal dust puffed into the void, wait for the colony to die, and only then seal.
There is often a second stage: abandoned comb inside a wall attracts carpet beetles and, if the cavity gets warm, honey or larval residue can stain through. Fixr lists in-wall wasp work at $350 to $875, and drywall repair afterwards at an average of $180.
If it turns out to be honeybees rather than wasps, the number changes considerably — Fixr prices honeybee removal from walls at $800 to $1,500 — because the job includes cutting out the comb and honey, which will otherwise ferment or attract every other insect in the neighbourhood.
The order to do it in, and the reversals that cost money
- Check the person if anyone was stung. Everything else waits.
- Identify the insect. Wasp or bee decides which trade answers the phone, and getting it wrong costs a call-out or a colony of honeybees.
- Locate the entry precisely, from a safe distance, in daylight.
- Treat, or have it treated.
- Confirm it’s dead — a full quiet day, minimum.
- Then remove the nest, clean out the comb, and seal the gap.
Three reversals are worth naming because they’re the ones people actually make:
- Sealing the entry before the colony is dead. They chew sideways and come out through the interior drywall. Covered above, and it is the single most expensive mistake on this page.
- Spraying honeybees before identifying them. You lose the free beekeeper collection, you may be breaking local rules, and if they’re in a wall you now have several kilos of dead bees and abandoned honey fermenting in a cavity — a worse and more expensive problem than the bees were.
- Removing the nest the same evening you treat it. Foragers out at dusk return to the site the next day. Give it a day, then take it down, and take it down properly — abandoned comb in a wall attracts carpet beetles and next season’s queens.
On honeybees specifically: a fuzzy golden cluster hanging on a branch is a swarm, it is usually gone within a day or two on its own, and county beekeeping associations keep swarm-collection contact lists. Do not spray it. Do not call a standard exterminator for it.
What a professional visit actually gets you
Beyond the removal itself: identification (which determines everything else), treatment of the void rather than just the surface, removal of the physical nest so it doesn’t attract secondary pests, and a look at how they got in. Fixr’s national average for wasp nest removal is $390, with a typical range of $325 to $450, and a full spread from $160 for something simple to $750 for something awkward.
Ask whether a follow-up visit is included. Fixr notes follow-ups otherwise run $100 or more, and stubborn in-wall colonies fairly often need one.