I want to apologize for a slow week in blogging. I only managed to get one post out of this ol’ brain after a pretty stressful weekend.
This is the story. All Summer we’ve been plagued by wasps. Periodically, we’d find them in the house. I never put much thought behind it. I figure they must be following us in or coming through a gap in the screen door. I was wrong. Really wrong.
Last Friday night, I chatted with my niece and brother on the phone for awhile. I didn’t get to start dinner until 9pm. As I was pulling stuff out of the fridge, I heard a buzz. Dang! A wasp! I killed it and went on preparing my dinner.
Then their was another wasp. I killed it. Turned around and there was another and another. After about the fifth killing, I got my Mom out of bed. I began to think something was really wrong with these wasps.
For the next half hour we kept killing them. Then I saw it. They were coming out of the can lights in the kitchen ceiling! Both of us worked quickly to cover the holes with bubble wrap and tape. When we were done, we had trapped three more wasps that had tried to escape. We got the heck out of Dodge and spent the night at our sisters.
The next morning my Mom went back to the house with my brother-in-law to meet up with my brother and the exterminator. What they found was eerie and creepy.
As I said we had been plagued by wasps all Summer. There was an opening in the eaves at the front door where they loved to build. We were killing those but we had no idea what was happening on the room. Their are two vents near the attic where the can lights hang from. This attic is not connected to the rest of the attic. The two vents were covered in wasps inside and out. The wasps were gaining entrance to the house through the attic and into our kitchen!
When all was said and done, they found six nests. There were two large ones on the roof in the vents. I can’t even imagine what might have happened if they all had gotten the idea to come through the lights. It would have been a nightmare.
Interestingly, solving the one problem solved another. We have been invaded by ants as well. Normally, they stay a couple weeks, get what they want, then are gone. This time they were behaving oddly. Instead of finding a line coming out of one opening, we’d find one on one side of the kitchen, one on the other. They never went for food. In fact, they seemed to love our cabinet with the dishes.
Well, we know the reason part now. The ants were feasting on the wasp larvae in our vents and attic. The ones that wandered in obviously were fully satisfied. We’d been providing them with buffet for weeks. They didn’t need our food at all!
I’m keeping my fingers crossed. It looks like getting rid of the wasps has also gotten rid of the ants. We had quite a bit of clean up to do as the powder used the house got on everything. But, everything is settled down now. Now I just have to stop dreaming of wasps!
This got me to thinking about my ancestors. Their houses weren’t constructed nearly as well as ours. How did they deal with such things as wasp or bee invasions? I remember reading somewhere that they used to smoke out wasps. Is that really true, I wonder?
All I can say is thank goodness for the modern age. Make a phone call and pay someone to deal with it. 😀
What a tiring week this has been!
