Wasp Nest Removal Mobberley

Mobberley runs for the best part of two miles along a single spine of lanes between Wilmslow and Knutsford, and that shape explains most of the wasp work here. There is no dense suburban core to speak of — around 3,100 people spread along a ribbon of cottages, farmhouses, converted barns and scattered plots, a good many of them inside the conservation area and dating from the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s. It is a more technical round than a street of matching semis. The fee is still a fixed £60 for the whole of WA16.

Where we find nests in Mobberley

The building stock here does not behave like post-war housing, so neither do the nests.

• Unsealed roof voids in pre-Victorian cottages. A 1930s semi has a boxed soffit with predictable joints. A seventeenth or eighteenth-century cottage along Town Lane often has no box at all — irregular coursing, a purlin end and open space behind it, so a colony spreads further into the roof than the outside suggests.
• Lime mortar and hand-made brick. Soft joints weather into finger-width gaps, particularly on north-facing gables and around old stone lintels. Where the traffic converges on one spot of wall rather than the roofline, the nest is behind the brick, not in the eaves.
• Barns, cart sheds and stables. The working and converted outbuildings on the lanes towards Pavement Lane and Faulkners Lane have high open roofs and timber nobody disturbs from one year to the next. They produce the largest colonies we deal with all season.
• Hedge banks, ditch sides and field margins. Plots here back onto grazing and hedgerow rather than another garden, so ground nests are far more common than they are on a suburban round. Most are found by a strimmer.
• Log stores and quiet outbuildings around Knolls Green. Stacked timber, dry, undisturbed and warm on a south wall is close to ideal for a queen in April.
• The well-drained banks near Mobberley Station. Sandy embankment ground along the Mid-Cheshire line suits common wasps nesting underground, and gardens backing onto it get the overspill.

Reading an old building properly

On modern housing the entry point is usually obvious within a minute. On a Mobberley cottage or a stone-plinthed farmhouse it can sit two or three metres from where the wasps appear busiest, because they are travelling through a void rather than straight in. We watch the flight line before applying anything, work from outside, and never drill, cut or open up historic fabric to reach a nest. Around St Wilfrid’s and the older Church Lane properties, that care matters more than speed.

One price for every nest

£60 fixed for a wasp nest, and the same £60 if it turns out to be hornets — a hornet is a wasp as far as the treatment goes, whatever the size of it. Bumblebee nests are £70, though we will usually tell you honestly that a bumblebee colony can be left where it is to die back naturally. There is no weekend rate, no supplement for a ground nest, a high barn roof or a long unmade drive, and no charge at all if we attend and there is no treatable nest on your land. If the colony is still active afterwards, we return and treat again for nothing.

Booking a Mobberley visit

Calls before mid-afternoon usually get a same-day slot through the season, and later ones the first appointment the following morning. A nest that is a mild nuisance now will be carrying several times the traffic by early September, so it is worth dealing with while it is small. Call 07770 015197 and describe what you are seeing — we can generally tell wasps from bumblebees over the phone before anyone comes out.