Need realistic yellow jacket pattern HELP!! Will pay $$

The current edition of Northwest Fly Fishing has a number of good articles in it. One of which is Bees: The McGinty and it's progeny. I've felt for years the thing that makes the McGinty work is the white tip of the wing. I felt white wings got more strikes.

 

My best dry fly day I can recall was when the trout keyed in on yellowjackets. I was using a semi-realistic foam bee with some success, and was bummed when a big fish broke me off. Digging through my boxes looking for a replacement, I found an old McGinty floating around. The fish crushed it, even more so than the more realistic version. I finished the day with over forty fish landed, at least thirty on the old school pattern. I've been waiting on this phenomenon to happen to me again, but now that I'm prepared, I haven't seen the trout key in on bees like that since.

 

Isn't that the shakes?! Same thing happened to me and craneflies. I was on a river and they were all over the place - so much so that my wife was creeped out and wanted to go back to the car. I cut up a skwala pattern and that worked "ok". Obviously that evening I bought a ton of cranefly imitations. I've never been on the river since then when they've hatched.

 

http://www.flyanglersonline.com/flytying/fotw/061200fotw.php

Old reliable for steel, gotta work for trout in smaller sizes.............

 

Bees can't bite. They can only sting you

 

When it comes to Yellowjackets, I wouldn't put biting past the little carnivorous bastards!

 

The latest Northwest Fly Fishing magazine has a article about bees (p. 12). The article also shows 4 or 5 patterns with a couple of them straight-forward ties. This has been a bad year for yellow jackets!

 

Galloup's site has a few nice bee flies. Try them like an attractor fly - you might be pleasantly suprised...

 

Um, that is soooo not true. Yellow Jackets and Bald Face hornets both bite and sting. Just ask my son

Those two bees bite him (and sting) more than anyone in our family. Poor kid must smell like a piece of rotten chicken to them.

 

On topic -- that's cool and weird. I count myself among people who see bee and wasp patters as mostly a novelty. I don't doubt the OP's description at all. It would be cool to see.

Off topic -- Bee's are quite different from Wasps.

Wasps can (and do) bite and sting repeatedly. Bee's (if I recall correctly) all die after they sting, sting once and cannot bite.

My latest, least favorite member of the Order is the "Goddamn Paperwasp" as I like to call them. They've been thick this year and I've been stung several times. I have a friend in the hills south of Spokane who is plagued by yellow jackets this year. The traps she puts out are nearly full after a few hours. Like thousands of them. There is a constant low hum at their farm from all the YJ. Hope for a hard winter.

 

I stand corrected. I haven't seen that many bees this year. A few Yellow jackets now and then, but no bees.

 

You are onto it. My opinion, yellowjackets are the most important terrestrial august-september. The imitation outfishes grasshoppers on my homewater. They hunt other insects over the water. The 'dipping' behavior is yellowjackets snatching tiny midges from the surface. here's my favorite: http://soft-hacklejournal.blogspot.com

 

Whoops. You'll have to scroll down through the October caddis article to get to the yellowjacket, but worth it all the way around.

 

Nice!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - now Free