It has been cool and wet almost all summer here in Michigan. Apparently, this is great not only for mosquitoes and gnats, but also for ants and wasps and hornets.
All except the paper wasps. They don't like the wet.
As I am busy cleaning the basement, there are flies that have appeared buzzing, big-bellied and BIG over night. The mosquitoes are horrid and have contributed to cutting walks shorter. There are enormous ant hills all over our property-- we only mow around the house, and now we are almost surrounded by ants.
AND... also almost overnight, we spotted a hornet's nest that is about TWICE THE SIZE OF YOUR HEAD on the east side of our house under the eaves at the peak.
I don't care how swelled your head is, it is twice the size. At least!
I spotted it as I was driving away one day and described it to my dh (Dear Husband). He said, maybe we can take care of it... I said, NO! We have to call an exterminator. When I showed it to him, he agreed. It's huge, no lie. One day it wasn't there, and it seems like the next day it was THERE, absolutely huge.
So we called the exterminator. He came out and was doing his thing outside the house. I noticed he was at the front of the house (north side) with his ladder for a bit. When I mentioned it to my dh, he thought it odd too, and he called just to make sure the guy did check the east side. Sure enough, he did check the east side and sprayed the hornet nest and was planning on coming back a few days later -- when the hornets were all dead-- to take down the nest. BUT, he said, I noticed that you had some yellow jackets nesting around one of the corners of the front of your house. I will need to get into the house to take care of that one.
So, we said okay. He came back a couple days later and went and looked in our little pantry in the basement that is right beneath our little foyer. He called my dh down to look at what he had found.
A GIANT YELLOW JACKET NEST! Almost as big as the hornet's nest outside. The guy
said that the species of yellow jackets don't make much bigger nests than that one. He said the hornet nest was the biggest he'd seen this season for that species too. He suited up and sprayed and dusted the nest and he will be back next week to take out both nests.
WHOA.
Once the fumes were gone, I took some pictures.
The white card in the picture with the yellow jacket nest in the pantry is a 3 X 5 index card.
The guy said we were fortunate that the yellow jackets nested in the corner of the pantry. If they had nested in the attic, that size of a nest meant that they would have gotten into and chewed up the dry wall.
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