How Dangerous Are Hornets in Texas? A Fort Worth Technician's Answer

Every summer we take calls from Fort Worth and across North Texas about "a hornet the size of my thumb" in the yard. Almost every one of those is a cicada killer wasp, which digs holes in the lawn and has the word killer in its name but almost never stings anyone. A few are bald-faced hornets, the black-and-white ones that build a paper football in a tree, and those deserve respect. And none of them are the Asian giant hornet you saw in the news, which has never been found in Texas; every report we've been sent from North Texas turned out to be a cicada killer. Here's how to tell the Texas hornets apart, which one can hurt you, and what to do about each.

Cicada Killer Wasps, the "Texas Ground Hornet"

All hornets are wasps, but not all wasps are hornets, and the cicada killer is the big one that fools everybody. It's an inch and a half to two inches long, rusty brown and black with yellow bands, with amber wings. From July into early September you'll see them hovering low over the lawn in the middle of the day, and you'll find their burrows: a hole about the width of a finger with a fan of loose sandy soil kicked out beside it, usually in a sunny, thin patch of grass or the sand along a sidewalk. In Fort Worth they favor the sandy Cross Timbers soils east and north of downtown.

They are not hornets because they don't build a paper nest and they don't live in a colony. Each female digs her own burrow, hunts cicadas out of the oaks and pecans, and drags them underground to feed her larvae. A yard with good conditions can have dozens of burrows by August, which is the real complaint: the holes, the mounds, and the sheer size of the thing patrolling the patio.

How Dangerous Is a Cicada Killer Wasp?

To a cicada, very. To you, hardly at all. The ones that hover at face height and bump into you are males, and males have no stinger. The females carry a stinger that can genuinely hurt, but they use it on cicadas and have no nest-guarding instinct, so a sting to a person happens only when one is grabbed, stepped on barefoot, or sat on. So a cicada killer is a nuisance, not a danger, and here's the part that costs us a few jobs to admit: if the burrows are in a corner of the yard nobody uses, you can leave them alone. They're gone by mid-September, and they eat cicadas. The exceptions are burrows in a play area, along a walkway kids use barefoot, or under a swing set, and a yard that gets more of them every year. Those we treat.

Bald-Faced Hornets

The bald-faced hornet is the insect Texans most often mean when they say hornet, and it's the one in this article that can hurt you. It's about five-eighths of an inch long, black with white markings on the face and the tip of the abdomen, and it builds a gray paper nest shaped like a football, sometimes as big as a basketball by August, hanging in a tree, under a deep eave, or on the side of a shed. Strictly speaking it's a large aerial yellowjacket rather than a true hornet, but the name has stuck for a century and the sting doesn't care about taxonomy. In Fort Worth we find the nests in live oaks, pecans and crape myrtles, most often noticed in late summer when the tree is being trimmed. A nest that goes unnoticed in June is a few dozen workers. By September it's several hundred.

Important Facts About Bald-Faced Hornets

• They can sting repeatedly without losing the stinger, and they will if the nest is disturbed.
• A sting can send anyone with a venom allergy to the emergency room. Carry your epinephrine if you've been prescribed it and you're working near trees in late summer.
• Workers guard the nest. Bump the branch, run a mower under it, or spray the entrance in daylight, and they come out in numbers and follow you.
• They are most defensive in September and October, when the colony is largest.
• The colony dies with the first hard freeze and an old nest is never reused. Only the new queens survive, tucked under bark or in a woodpile.

What To Do About Hornets

Cicada killers: usually nothing. Let them finish their season and improve the lawn where they dug, because thin, sandy, sunny ground is what invited them. If the burrows are somewhere kids or dogs play, we treat the individual burrows and the area around them, and the job is quick.

Bald-faced hornets: don't do it yourself, especially not from a ladder. The nest is treated at dusk, when the workers are home, by a technician in protective gear, and then removed so it can't be reoccupied that summer. A garden hose, a can of spray from the hardware store in daylight, or a bag over the nest are the three ways people get stung many times at once. Yellow jackets in the ground: never pour gasoline into the hole. We treat the entrance and the nest below it.

The best protection is not to be doing this every summer. Our stinging insect control service handles all of these, and a Pest365 plan covers stinging insects along with the ants, spiders and roaches, with a technician on the property regularly enough to catch a nest in June when it's the size of a golf ball.

All-Safe Pest & Termite has run routes through Fort Worth since 1984, and our Fort Worth wasp control page covers how we take a nest down. Reach out to us and request an inspection to get started.