OregonLuvr wrote:I occasionally find a small wasp nest around my eaves so I check periodically and have a couple cans of wasp spray handy. Works well. Irmi welcome back, you were missed.
Anne hopefully you will have a cool down soon. My mantra "C'mon Fall" I am ready!!!!!
Welcome back, Irmi!!
Well, thanks for the suggestion, Karen. I am just about ready to try anything. It topped out today at a "slightly warm-ish" 110* degrees. I just now tried your mantra, I think I'll try it every day from now on. It can't hurt, right?
Speaking about wasps. . . I lived in the Sierra Foothills for nearly thirty years (loved it there - had a view of lovely mountains out my living room window). Wasps were a fact of life in the area where I lived. We also had scorpions - but I'll leave that story for another time.
Anyway, one day when I was vacuuming up spiders (LOL - house spiders, of the daddy-long-lets variety were a fact of life up there, too. I had "spider day" about once a week. I liked to count them as I sucked them up the vacuum hose - my all-time, one-day "personal best" was eighty spiders. They
were small. . .), when I came across a big blister in the paint on my kitchen ceiling, just above my back door.
It was really strange looking, I didn't remember seeing it there before (certainly not since the previous week's spider extravaganza), so I just stood there looking up at it for a bit, puzzled. This blister was about the size of a dinner plate.
Finally, I reached up to touch it, and my finger poked right through the middle of the blister, it was kind of the thinnest of very brittle paper.
I had about ten seconds or so to think on
that, when suddenly the entire blister burst open - and I found myself standing directly below a shower of very startled wasps falling out of this amazing new hole in my ceiling. I immediately turned around to the kitchen cupboard and grabbed a paper plate and some masking tape, jumped on a kitchen chair, and covered the hole with the paper plate, and taped it firmly in place just as the entire wasp nest geared up and began to "sing".
And that was definitely a song I did
not want to listen to!
I don't remember getting stung - I think this sudden discovery was as much a surprise to the wasps as it was for me. They had pretty much fallen from the hole to the floor before thinking much about flying, and I was able to dispatch them by stepping on them and swatting them with a fly swatter. I could tell that their friends still in the ceiling had other ideas, but they were now blocked off.
After getting rid of the colony - it was a big one created between the studs in my ceiling, they had been coming in to the space between the studs via a tiny crack in the siding above my back door - I realized that they had probably been there for a while - at least long enough to chew through the sheetrock until the only layer left was a paper-like thin layer of paint!!
I have never cared too much for wasps. This little adventure did not improve my opinion of them.
At
all.Anne