Hear from Our Customers
The moment you find a wasp nest — under the eaves, near the deck, in the ground by the back fence — the clock starts. Yellow jacket colonies in Michigan don’t stay small. By the time the Michigan Renaissance Festival is drawing crowds down Dixie Highway in late August, a colony that looked manageable in June can have thousands of workers and zero tolerance for anything that gets close.
What changes after professional wasp nest removal is simple: you get your property back. The deck you’ve been avoiding, the area near the garage your kids stopped playing in, the path to the dock you’ve been walking around — all of it becomes usable again. No more planning your evenings around where the wasps are.
For Holly homeowners specifically, that matters more than it might somewhere else. The wooded lots, the lakefront properties, the older homes in the village core with decades of gaps in the trim and soffits — these conditions create more nesting opportunities than you’d find in a newer suburb. When we handle it right, we’re not just removing one nest. We’re identifying why your property attracted it in the first place.
We’ve been serving northern Oakland County and the communities along the I-75 corridor since May 31, 2005. That’s twenty years of Michigan wasp seasons — twenty years of knowing exactly when yellow jacket pressure peaks in the wooded neighborhoods around Seven Lakes State Park, and what hidden infestations look like in the older homes that line Holly’s historic village core.
Roger Chinault founded this company and still leads it with 26 years of hands-on pest control experience. When you call First Choice, you’re not getting a seasonal hire or a rotating crew. You get a career professional who knows your property — and will be the same person who shows up next season. No contracts. No strangers. No starting over every time.
We hold full MDARD licensing, carry complete insurance, and have earned recognition from both Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor. Discounts are available for seniors, veterans, and first responders — because Holly is the kind of community where that’s the right thing to do.
It starts with a call. You describe what you’re seeing — where the nest is, how long it’s been there, whether anyone’s been stung — and we schedule a visit that works around your life, not the other way around. Most Holly homeowners calling in are working commuters who use Exit 98 or Exit 101 off I-75 and need flexibility. That’s built into how we handle appointments.
When our technician arrives, the first thing they do isn’t spray. It’s look. A full property walkthrough covers the obvious nest you called about plus the eaves, the ground level, outbuildings, decking, and the wooded edges where Holly’s natural environment meets your yard. In a township bordered by Seven Lakes State Park and the Holly Recreation Area, there’s often more than one nest on a property — and finding all of them is part of the job.
Treatment is targeted and uses IPM-trained methods, meaning the approach is precise, not broad. After the nest is treated and removed, you’ll get a specific, clear answer on when it’s safe for your kids and pets to be back outside — not a vague “give it a few hours.” If wasps return after treatment, so do we. That’s not a policy buried in fine print. It’s just how the work gets done.
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Hardware store sprays work on the nest you can see. They don’t work on the colony behind your siding, the ground nest under the root system near your back fence, or the paper wasp situation building in the soffit of a home that’s been standing since the 1870s. Those are the calls we get after the DIY attempt — and they’re more common in Holly than most people expect, because older housing stock and wooded lots create nesting conditions that a spray can simply can’t address.
Every wasp nest removal service we provide covers a full property inspection, targeted treatment of all active nests found, physical nest removal where accessible, and a clear conversation about what made your property attractive and what to watch for going forward. For lakefront properties in Holly Township — where docks, boathouses, and outbuildings give yellow jackets multiple nesting options — that walkthrough is especially important.
We also price-match reasonable competitor rates, so if you’ve already gotten a quote, bring it. You shouldn’t have to choose between the cheapest option and the one that actually knows what they’re doing. And if you’re a senior, veteran, or first responder, ask about the discount before you book — it applies here.
Yes — and it’s not a coincidence. Seven Lakes State Park covers 1,434 acres of wooded, natural habitat sitting less than a mile northwest of the village. That much undisturbed land means a continuous, renewable source of wasp colonies every spring. Queen wasps overwinter in protected spots throughout that kind of terrain, emerge in April and May, and start building new nests — often on the residential properties that border the park.
If your home backs up to wooded land or sits near the park’s edge, you’re not dealing with an isolated problem. You’re dealing with consistent seasonal pressure from adjacent habitat that produces new colonies year after year. That’s why the same properties in Holly tend to see wasp activity repeatedly, and why a one-time spray rarely holds. Professional treatment combined with entry point identification gives you a much better shot at keeping the problem from coming back the following season.
The behavior is usually your first clue. Yellow jackets are aggressive, fast-moving, and tend to nest in the ground or inside wall voids and structural gaps — which is why they show up so often in the older homes throughout Holly’s village core, where decades of settling have created plenty of entry points. If you’re seeing wasps flying in and out of a hole in the ground, a gap in your siding, or a crack near a window frame, yellow jackets are the most likely culprit.
Paper wasps build the open, honeycomb-style nests you typically see hanging under eaves, on porch ceilings, or in the corners of outbuildings. Bald-faced hornets build the large, gray, papery enclosed nests that show up in shrubs and trees — common in the mature landscaping that characterizes a lot of Holly Township properties. All three are handled differently, which is one of the reasons a professional inspection matters. Misidentifying the species and treating it wrong can agitate the colony without eliminating it.
Leave it alone. The instinct to knock it down, spray it with whatever’s under the sink, or cover it with something almost always makes the situation worse. Disturbing a nest without the right treatment causes the colony to scatter and defend, which means a much higher chance of stings and a colony that’s now on alert. Yellow jackets in particular are capable of stinging multiple times, and a disturbed colony near a ground nest can respond in large numbers within seconds.
Mark the location from a safe distance so you can describe it clearly when you call. Note where wasps are entering and exiting, what time of day activity seems highest, and whether anyone in the household has a known allergy to stings — that’s important information for our technician. If someone has already been stung and is showing any signs of a severe reaction (swelling beyond the sting site, difficulty breathing, dizziness), that’s a medical situation first. Call 911, then call us.
They can, and it happens more often than most homeowners expect — especially in Holly’s older housing stock. Homes in and around the historic village core that date back to the late 1800s and early 1900s have accumulated decades of small structural gaps: deteriorating soffits, aging wood trim, cracks around window frames, gaps where utilities enter the building. Yellow jackets are particularly drawn to wall voids because they’re protected, temperature-stable, and close to foraging territory.
The signs of a wall void infestation are usually sound before sight — a buzzing or humming behind drywall, wasps appearing inside the house near windows or light fixtures, or a visible entry point on the exterior with consistent wasp traffic. These situations require a different treatment approach than a surface nest. The colony needs to be treated inside the void, not just at the entry point, and the entry point needs to be sealed after treatment to prevent future nesting. Our technicians have handled this specific scenario in older Holly homes and know what to look for.
Most residential wasp nest removal visits take between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on the number of nests found, their location, and how accessible they are. A single paper wasp nest under an eave is a straightforward job. A yellow jacket colony inside a wall void or deep in a ground nest beneath a root system takes more time and a more precise approach — both of which are common scenarios on the wooded, older properties throughout Holly Township.
After treatment, the re-entry window depends on what was used and where. Our technician will give you a specific timeframe — not a generic estimate — before they leave. For most exterior treatments, that window is a matter of hours. For interior treatments or situations involving pets and young children, the technician will walk through exactly what to watch for and when normal use of the space can resume. You won’t be left guessing.
Yes — we offer discounts for seniors, veterans, and first responders. Holly has a meaningful senior population, including residents of the Village of Holly Woodlands, and a community that genuinely values the people who’ve served it. Just mention it when you call and it gets applied to your service.
We also price-match reasonable competitor rates. If you’ve gotten a quote from another licensed pest control company serving the Holly area and it’s lower, bring it up before you book. The goal isn’t to be the cheapest option on the list — it’s to make sure price isn’t the reason you end up with a less experienced company handling a problem that, left untreated or treated wrong, tends to get more expensive. There are no binding contracts here either, so you’re not locked into anything beyond the service you’re paying for.
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