Wasp Nest Removal Gatley

Gatley is boxed in on every side: the A34 to the east, the M56 and Longley Lane across the top, the M60 and the Mersey to the west, and Grasmere Road marking the Heald Green boundary. Nearly everything inside that box went up in the 1920s and 1930s, after the station on the Styal line turned a farming village into a commuter suburb. What you get is street after street of bay-fronted semis with boxed timber eaves, hipped roofs and long back gardens, and at the north-western corner, Gatley Carrs — nineteen acres of woodland, rough grassland and willow swamp along Micker Brook, with houses backing straight onto it. Suburban housing of that age sitting next to genuine wet woodland is a pleasant place to live and a very good place to be a wasp.

Where we find nests in Gatley

• Boxed timber eaves. The semis on Foxland Road, Silverdale Road and Stonepail Road were built with deep wooden soffits. Ninety years of expansion and shrinkage opens a gap at the joint, and a queen needs no more than a few millimetres to get in.
• Hipped roof voids. Gatley roofs are mostly hipped rather than gabled, which gives a large, dry loft with an easy run in from the eaves. A nest that starts under the fascia in May is often up against a rafter by the middle of August.
• Banks along Micker Brook. Common wasps will nest in the ground given the chance, and the dry banks, old burrows and root cavities at the edge of the Carrs suit them. Gardens off Old Hall Road and the far end of Elm Road take the overflow.
• Detached garages and flat-roofed extensions. The brick garages down Gatley’s side alleys, and the 1970s rear extensions with felt roofs, both hold heat overnight and both have a cavity somewhere along the wall plate.
• Air bricks and vent covers. On the pebbledashed semis there is often nothing to see from the garden. The only sign is a steady line of wasps going in and out of one air brick low on the wall.
• Hedges and mature shrubs. Privet and beech boundaries around the Recreation Ground and Walter Stansby Memorial Park hide aerial nests until somebody puts a trimmer through one.

You do not need to have found the nest before you ring. A repeated flight line into the same point on the house is enough to work from, and we follow it in when we arrive.

Bees and bumblebees near the Carrs

Not everything busy in a Gatley garden in July is a wasp. Tree bumblebees regularly take over bird boxes and eaves on the older semis, and they look far more alarming than they are. A bumblebee colony dies back on its own by the end of summer and will not come back to the same hole, so if it is somewhere you can simply walk past, the honest answer is usually to leave it be. Where one sits over a door or across a child’s route to the garden, bumblebee nests are treated at £70. Honeybees are a different matter altogether — a swarm hanging in a tree is not our work, and a local beekeeper may collect a honeybee swarm.

What the job costs

£60, fixed, for a wasp nest anywhere in SK8. Hornets are a large wasp rather than a separate problem, so a hornet nest is treated the same way for the same £60. The price covers the visit, the treatment and a return if the nest is still active afterwards. There is no extra for a loft, for a nest at second-floor eaves height, or for a weekend, and nothing is added for the run down Styal Road or out towards Heald Green.

Booking a Gatley visit

Ring 07770 015197 and describe what you can see and where the wasps are going in and out. Most Gatley jobs are done the same day if you call in the morning, and you will be given a time window rather than left waiting all day. If you would rather not ring, fill in the callback form on this page and we will come back to you.