All this discussion about hornet removal jogged my memory and reminded
me of an experience
I had in Ohio.  I went out one evening with a fellow who removed bald
faced hornet nests as
a job for supplementary income and watched him in action.  He did it
with no protection
whatsoever, and he charged $50 a removal, and he did not kill any
hornets.  Here is the technique:

He had a tank of carbon dioxide gas under pressure, and he had a
tube/hose attached to the
tank.  He would go at dusk, turn on the tank and put the end of the
hose into the entrance of
the nest until it knocked out (anesthetized) the hornets (I think he
also held a rag or something
around the tube so all the gas would go into the nest.  He would then
clip off or remove the
nest and put it in a double plastic garbage bag with the end knotted
and then place it in the back
of his covered (with a camper shell) truck bed.   We got six or 8 that
night.  Of course, in a short
time the hornets would wake up and come out in the bag and be very
angry.  It made me nervous.
There was no rear window in the truck.

It only took him 5 or 10 minutes to remove a nest.  He told me that
once when the people saw
how easy it was and how little time it took to do, they said they were
not going to pay him.  He told
them that he would just put it back, then.  They changed their mind.
He was licensed and bonded
and had made an investment in training and equipment that was quite
substantial.  By the way,
he only got stung on the chin 7 or 8 times that evening, but said he
was used to it and it didn't
bother him.  I stood back as I watched (full of adrenalin).

He said that he had a fantasy that some day he wanted to walk into a
biker's bar with a couple
of those bags in his hands and insult some bikers and then swing the
bags over hard and break
them open on the bar.  He could take the stings without them bothering
him, but nobody else
would be able to.

What he did with them afterwards was to take them home with him and put
them in the trees in
his yard.  He had two trees that he called his "death trees" that each
had about 10 or 15
or more hornet nests in them.  Better than a watch dog, one on either
side of the house.  He had
almost run out of places to put them, the trees were so full or hornet
nests.

When we got back to his house, he had to "gas" them with CO2 again
(through the neck of the
bag) to knock them out before he removed a nest and placed it in the
tree (a conifer with
horizontally spreading branches, if I recall correctly.  It looked like
a Christmas tree with large
gray paper ornaments).  He even had one nest that he'd made into a
"double-decker" by placing
one right on top of the other, and then the hornets built them
together.  There was an upper and a
lower entrance.  After he put a nest in the tree, he would pick up the
loose hornets with his fingers
and poke them into the hole in the nest so they wouldn't be lost.  He
hated the thought of killing
any of them.  If this description doesn't give you some ideas about how
to solve the problem
without killing them, then you don't have much imagination IMHO.

It was quite an exciting evening for me, but I don't think I would like
to do it for a living.  Best
wishes for a successful outcome.

Layne Westover, College Station, Texas

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