Wasp Nest Removal Marple

Marple sits on the eastern edge of Stockport, where the Goyt valley begins to climb towards the Peak District. It grew as a canal town and then a railway town, and the buildings still show it. Within half a mile of Market Street there are gritstone cottages, tall Victorian and Edwardian detached houses, interwar semis along Hibbert Lane and postwar housing around Rose Hill station. That mix, plus a great deal of mature garden and woodland, gives Marple a busier wasp season than the flatter suburbs west of town.

Where we find nests in Marple

The stock here is older and stonier than most of the borough, and the nests follow the fabric of the buildings.

• Boxed soffits on the big Victorian and Edwardian houses. The double-fronted properties along Church Lane, Hibbert Lane and Bowden Lane have deep timber eaves with a hollow behind them. A joint that has shrunk by a few millimetres is all a queen needs in May, and by August there is a nest the size of a football sitting over the bedroom ceiling.
• Roof voids under old slate. Marple roofs are mostly heavy slate on timber battens, and wasps get in beside a slipped slate or through failed mortar at a chimney flashing. You usually hear them before you see them, a dry rustling in the loft on a warm evening.
• Gaps in gritstone walls and cottage eaves. The stone cottages around Hawk Green, Strines Road and the older parts of Marple Bridge have shallow eaves and thick walls, so a colony builds inside the wall head rather than in the roof. The dry stone garden and retaining walls on the sloping streets do the same job.
• Banks and hedge bottoms along the Peak Forest Canal. Gardens backing onto the towpath between Marple Junction and the foot of the lock flight sit next to dry, south-facing embankments, which suit ground-nesting common wasps. The flight line then runs across the garden at head height, which is how most people notice.
• Trees and tall hedges on the Brabyns Park side. Where gardens back onto the old Brabyns Hall parkland and the riverside woodland we see more exposed aerial nests, the grey papery ball hanging in a hedge or on a low branch, built by tree wasps.
• Sheds, log stores and garden offices. The long back gardens off Dale Road and the Ridge give German wasps what they want: somewhere low, dark and dry that nobody opens between April and July.

The lock flight and the canal corridor

Marple’s sixteen locks lift the Peak Forest Canal a hundred and forty feet or so through the middle of town, one of the steepest flights in the country, and the corridor around them shapes our summer here more than any single street does. The lock chambers are dressed gritstone with generations of open joints, the towpath embankments are dry and face the sun for much of the day, and the strip of woodland between the flight and Brabyns Park is barely managed. Ground-nesting common wasps take the banks, cavity nesters take the stonework of bridges and lock surrounds, and the gardens whose fences meet the towpath inherit the foragers from all of it. If your house sits between Station Road and the flight, an August garden full of wasps does not necessarily mean a nest on your property, and part of our visit is establishing which side of the fence the colony actually occupies. Where it is on council or Canal & River Trust land we will say so plainly rather than charge you for a treatment that solves nothing.

Rose Hill, Hawk Green and the edges

The Rose Hill side has its own character. The streets around the station, Railway Road and the cutting of the old Macclesfield line are mostly interwar and postwar semis, which brings the standard soffit-and-bargeboard work, and the Middlewood Way trailhead at Rose Hill adds the same sunny-embankment ground nests the canal produces on the other side of town. Hawk Green, up on the plateau by the cricket pitch, mixes gritstone cottages with newer infill, and the older stone there nests wasps in the wall heads exactly as the Strines Road cottages do. Mellor, across the Goyt, is covered from its own Marple Bridge page. Everything on the Marple side, from the Ridge down to Dan Bank, is inside the same fixed price with nothing added for the hill roads.

Bumblebees and honeybees

Not everything in a Marple wall is a wasp. Bumblebee nests turn up regularly in old stone walls, in bird boxes and under decking, and they are £70 if treatment is genuinely needed. Very often it is not needed. A bumblebee colony is small, has no interest in your kitchen and dies back naturally by the end of summer, and the same hole is rarely used again. Honeybees are a separate matter. We do not treat them, and a local beekeeper may collect a honeybee swarm that settles in a garden.

The price, and what it includes

£60, fixed, for a wasp or hornet nest anywhere in Marple. Hornet nests change nothing but the noise level, since the hornet is itself a member of the wasp family, and the treatment and fee are identical. The £60 covers the visit, locating the nest, treating it and destroying the colony, plus a free return if anything is still flying afterwards. A nest under a three-storey gable on Stockport Road costs the same as one in a shed at Rose Hill. There is no weekend or evening surcharge, no mileage charge out to Strines, and you pay once the nest has been dealt with.

Booking a Marple visit

Call 07770 015197 or use the callback form on this page. It helps if you can say roughly where the wasps are going in, which side of the house, how high, and whether it is the roof, a shed or a wall. Mention it if access is tight, as it often is on the narrow stretches of Brabyns Brow, Lockside and Strines Road. After treatment, keep the nearest windows shut for an hour or two and stay out of that part of the garden while the returning workers die off.