In spring and early summer they pick caterpillars for their young, in late fall, they are all collecting as much nectar as they can get. They will swarm on cowpea nodes, on compost piles containing watermelon, fruit, anything sweet, in the fall. You might want to make sure that your wasps are not yellow jackets, which hover from side to side as they land. Yellow jackets will become aggressive to protect the nest or even a food source. So if a little kid bumps a nest by mistake there could be disaster. I had to burn out a yellow jacket nest this summer and then in fall the survivors swarmed a compost pile full of overripe melons and aggressively protected it. My neighbors have small children, so I sprayed the compost with Sevin and dusted it with borax. The survivors moved to swarming on the cowpeas, so I sprayed the cowpeas with Sevin and hung a soda bottle trap half full of watermelon juice with a dash of dishsoap on the trellis. When I took the vines down, the survivors moved back to the compost pile. I'd almost rather have caterpillars. In fact I did have caterpillars, in the beans and in the peppers, never seen them in either plant before. I wonder what they were.

I've read soapy water kills them. It coats their bodies and they lose their protective layers and die. I use it in the ant moat of my hummingbird feeder and the wasps die. Be careful though because the soap took the color off my red super bells and they turned tan :( Luckily, a storm came and washed away the tan flowers. If there are just on or two wasps eating the fruit you could kill them with a fly swatter, but it sounds like there are a lot of them. Good luck, Eric

Hi Alon, Welcome to the Hummingbird Forum, and thanks for the link to your blog! The sunbirds are absolutely beautiful!! Your homemade feeder looks like it would work very well with hummingbirds. The ant trap is very similar to ones we make using caps from spray paint cans. However, we can't use Vaseline for fear of it getting on the flight feathers. Here are pics of hummingbird feeders I made using PVC pipe and empty bottles. The 1st uses a 3 L wine bottle, the 2nd uses a 1.5 L tequila bottle... The link below is to a video of the hummers using one... Here is a link that might be useful: PVC feeder

I have not yet seen a wasp get the best of a hummer at my feeders, usually my hummers will always run wasps off. Wasps are not as fast as a hummer nor can they change directions the way a hummer can, although if a wasp were to sting a hummer Im sure it would die. I wont put a separate feeder just for bees, but I have heard of another trick which my be your wasp trap. I have heard of cutting the top off a milk jug to insert a funnel and put a mixture inside of catfood and applesauce. I am not bothered by honey bees just wasps and yellow jackets and the latter two I care little for.