If You Don't Want To Attract Wasps, Avoid This Sweet-Smelling Mistake

Whether relaxing in your outdoor living space or hiking in the woods, wasps can be a very real problem. If you just can't seem to get away from these stinging insects, you may need to consider what you're wearing. Wearing bright colors can attract wasps. However, so can certain scents. So, if you don't want to attract wasps, you might want to hold off on wearing perfume, certain hairsprays, and other sweet-smelling scents when outdoors. 

The fact your scent can attract wasps may come as a surprise. However, while a certain Victoria Secret perfume works as a mosquito repellent, other scents can actually have the opposite effect on wasps, as well as mosquitoes. The reason they might be buzzing around you has to do with the fact wasps feed on nectar produced by sweet-smelling flowers. They spend much of their day wandering around looking for food using sight and smell to identify these flowers. In fact, their sense of smell may be the most important and fine-tuned of their senses, even more accurate than a dog's nose at hunting down a scent. Fragrances with a fruity, floral, or sweet scent serve as an attractant to these insects. This can include any type of scented product beyond perfume or cologne, including grooming, laundry, and cleaning supplies.

Should you need proof that wasps are attracted to sweet scents, simply set a glass of fruit juice or an opened can of soda near a wasps' nest. If you are wondering what this has to do with cleaners and personal hygiene products, a quick glance at the label will explain it. A high number of women's perfumes — and an increasing number of men's cologne's — incorporate some sort of fruit or floral scent, including citrus, peach, and passionfruit and florals like lavender or sweet pea. Walk past the bath care shop in the mall, and you'll immediately catch the virtual cornucopia of fruit notes wafting from scented personal hygiene products, such as soap, shampoo, deodorant, and hairspray. Brightly decorated bottles, tubes, and jars exude scents like cucumber-melon or coconut-lime.

Unlike you, wasps can't read the label, nor can they see the bottle from which this deceptive scent came, but they can smell even the slightest trace. So, if their highly sensitive olfactory senses pick up a scent they like, they will investigate the source. If that source is you, then you will likely have an uncomfortably close encounter with a wasp.

This aromatic attraction also applies to cleaning products. When cleaning your patio table or outdoor seating to prevent attracting ants, flies, or wasps to residual food and drinks, don't use orange or lemon scented cleaners. Instead, use vinegar to clean your outdoor furniture and patio. If you insist on using a scented cleaner, use one that smells like mint instead of fruit, as mint is known to repel wasps.