On Saturday morning while out on the porch, having coffee and watching the sky change as the sun rose, my idyll was shattered by … a gigantic wasp landing on my leg and then getting all up in my face. I don’t mind most insects, but wasps can go right to hell.
It flew away pretty quickly, fortunately without stinging me. A little later I saw another couple of wasps, and when I went down stairs I saw a number of dead bees on the patio and realized that oh damn, we have a wasp problem.
Looking around the house and peeking under the eaves and overhangs and under the porch, I counted at least 6 small wasp nests, all, mercifully, in the early stages of being built for the season, some maybe just abandoned from last year. At this point, they are a manageable problem – but later on there’s the potential for the hives to contain THOUSANDS of wasps, which makes it a lot more dangerous and difficult to get rid of them. A couple of the nests might actually be bee hives – poor things are just hopelessly outclassed when it comes to fighting off wasps.
This discovery unfortunately happened on Easter weekend, so I couldn’t get anyone out to remove the nests, and I’m not dumb enough to think I can watch a couple of YouTube videos and take them down myself, but hopefully I’ll be able to have someone out this week to get rid of ’em.