One popular urban legend is that hanging a small brown paper bag will drive away wasps. The theory is that wasps are highly territorial and view the bag as an established competing wasp nest whose area they dare not enter.
One problem with this theory is that there are over 30,000 known species of wasps, all presumably with varying concepts of territory and nests. It may be unreasonable, for example, to figure that a yellow jacket, who lives underground, would be horrified by the fact that there appeared to be a brown nest from a totally different species hanging off of the eaves of a house.
Nonetheless, because of a plethora of paper wasps each summer in our neighborhood, I decided to try an experiment to see how bags worked against this ubiquitous insect with the very unpleasant rating of 3.0 on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Less than a week after putting up the sack, I noted a paper wasp diligently building its nest approximately two inches from the bag.
Does this conclusively establish that there is nothing to the theory? Not necessarily. As we noted, there are a lot of species of wasps. Maybe the bag would have repelled, for example, bald-faced hornets instead. Maybe the bag was the wrong size or shape. All I can say for sure is that if you are allergic to wasps, you should not throw away your epinephrine pen just because you put paper sacks around the outside of your house.
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