Wasps can be very dangerous. Unlike bees, one wasp can sting you repeatedly. Some breeds are also easier to spook and react violently with little provocation. Keeping them away from a fun-filled zone like the swimming pool area is a good idea.

Wasps around the swimming pool should be easy to maintain. Before starting the remediation, you must understand why there are so many wasps around the pool or any of your water features.

Why Are There So Many Wasps Around My Pool?

Naturally, bees and wasps buzz around, looking for nectar on flowers and hunting small insects to feed their young. 

These trips will eventually have them stumble across your backyard, pool deck, and swimming pool. This could happen even if there are no insects or flowers to keep them busy. They will hang around if they discover your home has something good for them.

Besides hanging around for food, wasps will also find your swimming pool water useful in the hot and dry summer. They will use the water to cool themselves down and quench their thirst.

ProTip: Wasps are never out to get you. They will not sting you unless they feel provoked. The problem is that spooking them around the pool is very easy.

How Do I Get Rid of the Wasps Around My Pool?

Luckily, wasps and even bees are easy to distract and chase away from the pool area. Since they are there for resources, making them less pleasant to access or available somewhere else will leave you with a wasp-free swimming pool.

Give Them an Alternative Water Source

If the wasps land on your swimming pool to drink and cool off, offering a different water source will keep them off.

You must do this before the wasp season starts or later when the wasps have already discovered your pool. A clean, untreated source of water that’s more natural than your treated swimming pool water will be an enticing alternative.

Availing the water earlier in the season with your pool still covered will establish that alternative as the main water source for your winged visitors.

Moreover, if it is in the garden where all the flowers and insects are, the wasps will have no reason to visit your swimming pool.

You can use a birdbath, a portable pool, or even a dish of water for distraction.

Introduce Natural Repellents

After offering them a distraction water source, the next step to chasing them away from your main pool is using repelling natural scents. Some of the smells that wasps hate include:

• Lemongrass
• Geranium
• Clove
• Mint

My favorite trick is mixing peppermint oil with water and spraying it around the pool area.

You can also use some sound cues to keep the wasps away. They hate the rustling sound dryer sheets make. Hanging some sheets in hidden places will do the job if they produce that rustling sound.

ProTip: Keep sweet smells like flowery scents, sugary drinks, and exposed food away from the pool as they will attract wasps and bees

Cover Up the Swimming Pool

Covering up the pool at the start of the wasp season ensures they don’t discover it. This will work hand in hand with the alternative water source theory. 

They can’t hang around your pool if they have no access to the water. Additionally, you could opt for solar covers with the additional benefit of passively heating the swimming pool.

How to Keep Wasps Away from the Pool

Getting rid of the wasps once they are at your pool can be a bit more challenging. However, a couple could still slip through and pay you unwanted visits. 

Here are some additional tips and tricks to help you keep wasps away from the pool once and for all.

Install Decoy Wasp Nests

Wasps are extremely territorial. They don’t let other wasps take over their turf. If you set up some decoy nests around your home and the pool, other roaming wasps will think it’s already taken and might move on – unless they are pumped for a fight.

Setting up the decoys at the very start of the season could increase the success rate. Nonetheless, this hit-or-miss technique is still a valuable addition to your wasp fight arsenal.

Hang Enticements Somewhere Else

This is a nice trick that will work for hand in hand with the alternative water source trick. Adding enticements next to this water source will make it even more attractive to the wasps.

Start with availing some sugary syrup or spraying a fruity perfume at the alternative location. If it is in the garden, growing some flowers will create a natural ecosystem that is better than your swimming pool.

You can entice the wasps further by hanging a piece of raw meat. This is a perfect alternative to the insects they hunt and will have them flocking to that location instead of your swimming pool. Just remember to remove the meat within two days; otherwise, it will begin to rot, attracting flies and maggots (it will also smell terrible)

Wasps find diesel smell very attractive. Get some diesel, pour it into a small open bottle, and leave it close to your pool. This will effectively create a wasp trap.

Alternatively, you can put some diesel on an open platter and place it next to the rest of the enticements to create the perfect wasp hot spot far away from your beloved swimming pool or water feature.

Use Wasp Traps

Wasp traps are a more aggressive way of keeping the wasp traffic as low as possible around your backyard. I only recommend this after all the above tricks fail, as in most cases, a good number of the trapped wasps will die.

The simplest wasp trap is a bottle full of sugary water.

• Take any small water bottle and lose the cap.
• Pour a little bit of oil or anything slippery and shake it so that it covers the inner walls making the slippery
• Add in a sugar-water solution to fill the bottle a quarter way
• Hang the bottle near the pull or place it on the ground at a spot near the pool with the highest visible wasp traffic

Empty the bottle at the end of a day or two. If any wasps are still alive, you can consider emptying the bottle far away from the pool instead of killing them. Be careful. The wasps will be spooked and ready to sting.

Remove Any Nearby Wasp Nests

Getting rid of wasp nests could be a good way to convince nearby wasps to move away. After all, no one likes returning home to demolish their house. Since you will directly confront the wasps at their home, you must take some precautions to avoid stings. 

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Here is the safest procedure to follow

• Get an insect killer spray that works on wasps from your convenience store
• Find the nest or nests you want to remove
• Wait until nighttime when the wasps are dormant and spray the nest from a safe distance.
• Keep spraying the nest and observing it for a couple of days until you see no activity around it. This could take around three days.
• Once you are confident all the wasps using the nest are dead, you can remove it and throw it in the trash.

You have to wait for a couple of days until there is no more activity around the nest. Otherwise, any wasps not caught in the initial extermination will move in and rebuild, taking you back to square 1.