Wasp Nest Removal Dunham Massey

Dunham Massey is the quietest part of WA14 we cover and, structurally, the most interesting. A deer park first documented in 1362, roughly three hundred acres of ancient pasture-woodland, and some thirty-one thousand trees planted across the estate in the early eighteenth century all press up against a thin scatter of low-density housing — estate cottages, farmhouses, converted barns and stable blocks, the lot of it ringed by more than three thousand acres of National Trust land. Old timber and quiet outbuildings are the two things a wasp queen looks for in April, and out here they sit next door to each other.

Where we find nests in Dunham Massey

• Estate cottage eaves. The brick cottages around Dunham Town and School Lane have low, shallow eaves and older joinery, so a gap of a few millimetres opens straight into a roof void. From the lane you see nothing at all except a steady flight line into one spot.
• Stables, tack rooms and open-fronted barns. Roof plates and collar beams inside a building that is only visited at either end of the day give a colony months of undisturbed growth. Nobody notices until the numbers are already high.
• Veteran oaks and standing deadwood. Hollow limbs along the park boundary carry natural colonies, and hornets in particular go for them. A nest in a tree over a drive or a paddock gate is worth treating; one out in open parkland generally is not.
• Log stores and stacked timber. Wood piles are everywhere out this way. They shelter queens over the winter and they are a common starting point for ground-level colonies in spring.
• Old retaining walls and banked verges. Along Charcoal Road and Bollington Lane there are brick walls and cut banks with cavities behind them at precisely the height a strimmer reaches.
• Bird and bat boxes. Boxes go up all over this parish, and what is inside one is as likely to be a tree bumblebee as a wasp. Worth identifying before anyone does anything.

Knowing what you have before you book

It matters more here than on a suburban street, simply because there is more of everything flying.

• Wasps and hornets. Hard-bodied, sharply marked, moving fast and directly in and out of a single gap. Hornets are bigger and browner but behave the same way and take the same treatment.
• Bumblebees. Round, furry and unhurried, usually in a bird box, a compost heap or under decking. The colony stays small and dies back on its own, so leaving it be is very often the right answer, and we will say so rather than sell you a treatment.
• Honeybees. A hanging swarm the size of a rugby ball, or a colony settled in a chimney. We do not treat honeybees. Ringing a local beekeeper, who may collect a swarm, is the better move.

The £60 arrangement

A wasp or hornet nest is £60. A bumblebee nest, on the rare occasions removal is genuinely necessary, is £70. That figure is the whole bill: nothing for call-out, nothing extra at weekends, no supplement for the drive down towards the Bollin, and no difference between a two-bedroom cottage and a barn conversion with a paddock attached. Should the first treatment leave the colony standing, the second one is on us.

We treat nests on site. Wasps, hornets and bumblebees are the whole of the work, and we do not take on general pest control, which is why we are quick at it.

Booking a Dunham Massey visit

Call 07770 015197. Dunham Massey is a short run west of Altrincham, so a morning call is usually treated the same day, and we can work around a gate code, a dog, or a horse that would rather we did not park in the yard. If you are not certain whether the nest is on your land or the estate’s, tell us what is visible from ground level and we will work it out on the phone before anyone commits to a visit.