A large colony of hornets had established themselves in a the roots of an old poplar I had uprooted and left in a field. I put on my bee suit and tried wasp spray which said it would 'kill all flying insects immediately,' it didn't!

I then filled plastic bags with paper lit a firelighter and stuffed the lot under the nest. I guess that did the trick.

However, I didn't get stung and, although I have been stung many times by wasps and bees, I wondered whether anyone had been stung by a hornet and what type of pain it was.

This may sound an odd question as most of us feel pain in different ways but, to me, a bee sting is not bad initially but grows as an irritating dull pain for about three days before it declines. On the other hand a wasp sting is sharp and painful but has gone in about half an hour.  I simply wondered whether a hornet would be more like a bee sting, acid or wasp sting, alkaline.

 

Hornet stings don't hurt that much - less than a bad wasp or bee sting (had one on my forearm two summers ago), at least partly because they contain a toxin that kills nerves as well as other tissue. You end up with a necrotic abcess about the size of a small pea if you're lucky, which takes weeks to heal, and months or years to become invisible. I've just looked, and there is still a small patch on my arm where the sting was over two years ago. Whether the venom is acid or alkaline I don't know, but that is not particularly relevant to its killing power as used on small rodents etc. as well as wasps and other large insects. Organophosphorus based insecticides seem to work quite reliably on Hornets, but synthetic pyrethroids seem to be a bit mixed, and the only one we've had success with was a genuine Rentokil product. No need this year, but lack of Hornets has correlated with a vast number of small wasps (not the big European ones).

 Flypor works a treat on wasp, bee and hornet nests.  We had a wasps nest in one of the holes in a loader for our massey 35, I picked it up to put it on the tractor and a wasp perched on my kneecap and stung me.  120ml of Flypor suirted onto the nest with a dosing gun from about 5 yards away, leave 10 mins and they are all dead.