Doug..if i remember right you work out in the bush up north a lot so i guess when it comes to run-in's with the stingers you know from what you speak!!

I suspected you meant wasps. But our forum spans a pretty large footprint, geographical and ecological, and there are lots of nasty biters I have yet to meet.

The mandibles on a bald-face are mighty impressive, and they are known to "bite" as well as sting. Consider yourself (relatively) lucky: the sting is often described as a white-hot rivet burning its way through your skin. Noooo thank you.

I have used a bug bomb twice in 19 years. These were situations where there were no other realistic options and there was an immediate danger to people. FWIW, they were the Chrysanthemum-derived (likely synthetic copies). Totally effective in the first go-round. And after a winter in the garden shed, totally ineffective. This is telling, and soothes my eco-guilt a little.

I've seen my share of stingers, including mass formation attacks of mosquitoes. Still, I mostly operate in aspen parkland and mountain foothills. It's the folks in forestry and surveying and tree-planting who work in the northern Boreal forests of Alberta and British Columbia that are the real tough guys (and gals). They endure, and survive, mass-formation black fly attacks. These are, by every account, the devil's chosen instrument of non-stop torture. I have been known to time my northern trips with a first frost; no bugs, all those low hardwood shrubs in flame red, the birches and tamaracks in golden glory, and all the turistas have dragged their DEET-sodden, fly-bitten carcasses home. A little research goes a long way.

You can also get off-the-shelf yellow Jacket traps in most nurseries and home stores. They come with a pheromone bait (just be very careful that you don't get any of it on you). These work well in my experience here in So. Cal. I used them one year in my yard and didn't see another Yellow Jacket for several years after that!

Since they use pheromone's there are no pesticides involved.

Yellow Jacket trap