Fun with Wasps

Being a gardener has helped me appreciate bees more and fear them less. Bumblebees are just fuzzy and adorable, and ensure “busy as a bee” continues to be an accurate saying. Honey bees are the royal family of the bee kingdom. We plant flowers for them, donate money to help save them, and yell at each other online when anyone suggests a gardening technique that could harm them. I’ve even learned to tolerate yellow jackets since I’ve seen them on the flowers helping to pollinate. I just have to remember to keep grilled meat away from them. No offense yellow jackets, but chicken and beef-eating bugs are just creepy.

But wasps? Oh sure, if you Google them, there are the do-gooder pages about how they pollinate figs and orchids and eat other bugs, blah blah blah. There ain’t no figs or wild orchids in Boston, and there are plenty of other bugs that eat bugs. Other bugs that don’t have sinister-looking long legs and disturbing, elongated bodies that send your eyes traveling along right to that stinger at the end. Menacing little bahstids if you ask me, and since you are reading this, you are asking me.

For the past few years a lone wasp has made it into the kid’s room, maybe 3 or 4 times a year, mostly when the seasons change. It’s more of a nuisance for me. I just have to trap it with a swatter and then smoosh it with a paper towel. The kid gets woken up in the middle of the night hearing a telltale “psst, psst, psst” sound of the wings hitting the walls and ceiling. He heads to the couch, closing the door behind him and leaves me a note about the midnight visitor. He’s young and can deal with the sleep deprivation.

It wasn’t happening frequently enough to tell my friend/landlady, and I’d forget about it between swattings. I have looked outside the window but didn’t see a nest. The building is 200 years old, so there’s no point in even trying to find where they’re getting in. It’s probably easier to find where they aren’t getting in, which turned out to be true.

We saw a few bahstids this spring, but by July and August, I was killing a few every other week. Time to really look for the nest, not just a quick peek out the window. We live on the second floor, so I leaned out uncomfortably far to look. Nothing. I finally called my friend, and she and her wife came to the rescue with wasp killer spray. They noticed wasps were flying in and out of a crack that went underneath the wood siding. Damn. It was also about 3 feet below the window, and angled 3 feet away. They sprayed the bejesus out of the crack and a few other areas for good measure. It was dripping down the side of the building and onto the roof of the entryway. We briefly stopped one of my neighbors from coming into the building. It was messy, but as good as we were going to get. We were hopeful.

A few days later I checked, and they were still coming and going from that area, and then I noticed a second entrance. About 2 feet from the first crack we noticed, it was presumably the end of the nest. The tough angle and my healthy fear of leaning too far out of the second story window meant that I couldn’t really aim the spray directly into the nest. Just blast the hell out of the entrance/exit and any wasps that were unlucky enough to be there. I confess this liberal snowflake enjoyed blasting 4 or 5 wasps out of existence.

But of course they weren’t done. We had a few days without wasps, but they continued to make their way into the room. Now I was getting pissed off. I decided to block all the most obvious spaces for entry with a giant roll of packing tape, clear plastic bags, controlled menopausal anger, and a deep fatigue of having to swat and smoosh the little fuckers.

I taped up the window, the baseboard heater, and a large-enough-for-a-wasp-to-get-through gap between the wall and door frame. The kid joked that it looked like a crime scene. If only, and the crime being their dead little bodies stuck to the sticky side of the tape.

Did I get any satisfaction? Nope. They were still appearing, outside of the tape, but at least all the tape and plastic forced them to stay on the wall where it was easier to whack ’em. I was beginning to feel like Bill Murray in Caddyshack. We were both mystified about how they were getting in.

The internet’s helpful advice was to remove the nest. No shit, Sherlock. But does the internet tell you how to get to a nest built under the wood siding, 15-20 feet up from the ground, and 3 feet down from and in between 2 windows? Not so much.

She came again and sprayed at a different angle which definitely made them mad. Join the club you little bahstids. We were wasp free for 2.5 days, and then another one appeared at night. I didn’t have time to kill it in the morning because I had to go into the office. So we just kept the door closed. I ended up getting home late, around 9 pm. Grumbling, I got the swatter and the paper towel and headed in. I peered cautiously in and looked around. No wasp. I carefully poked at a few hiding places. Nothing. I left and got ready for bed. 20 minutes later I checked again thinking maybe it had come out of it’s hiding place. Still nothing.

But then I peered at the taped up baseboard heater, hoping against hope to find one stuck to the tape. Ah, the magical thinking of the wasp obsessed. But then I saw something dark suspended above the floor between a small media tower and the heater. I got my phone light and cautiously poked it. It was a curled up, very dead wasp stuck in a spider’s web. Ha! I nearly jumped up and whooped. Take that you buzzing son of a bitch! I removed the wasp, tearing the web, and the teeniest little spider scuttled out. I felt momentarily bad and hoped he had had his fill of the wasp. Lord knows what else that little thing was eating.

But O how the mighty had fallen! Huzzah for nature’s balance and for half-assed housekeeping! There will likely be an exterminator in my future, one who presumably has the equipment to get at the most difficult and awkwardly placed wasp nest ever.

Until then, I have my small but mighty wasp killer.