A faint buzzing wakes me up in the middle of the night. Groggy, I assume it’s an annoying mosquito that’s slipped into the house. I cover my head with my pillow and try to go back to sleep. But the buzzing gets louder. And louder. If this is a mosquito, it’s the size of a small bird.
Hours later my wife yelps. “Something’s hurt me!” We turn on the lights, turn down the bed, and there it is – a wasp. Or a hornet or a yellow jacket. I can’t tell the difference. But it stung her. An early salvo. We are soon at war with a monstrous, unrelenting army of flying, stinging insects. And it’s DEFCON 5, the highest alert level.
It’s estimated that a mature wasp nest can house up to 2,000 insects Paul R. Cote courtesy photo
These wasps, as I’ll call them, found some rotted wood under an eave, penetrated it, and proceeded to build a nest inside the wall of our house. It’s estimated that a mature wasp nest can house up to 2,000 insects, and from the invasion numbers I’ve seen (and killed) in our bedroom, I believe it. I can’t swat or vacuum them up fast enough.
Much like Agent Smith, the villainous, self-replicating AI program in “The Matrix,” there seemed to be no end to them, and no way to kill them all. I’d kill 20 and 20 more would appear in minutes. Later I learned that killing wasps makes the problem worse. Each one you kill releases a pheromone that makes the other wasps even angrier, and thus more aggressive and prone to swarm, like you turned already pissed off bugs into fire-breathing dragons.
My wife and I spent a couple of days in Massachusetts, and when we returned there were at least 100 of these little demons flying around our bedroom. The buzzing in the room now sounded like Sunday night at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, a very busy airport serving North Carolina’s home to the NBA’s Hornets.
Obviously just swatting them wasn’t going to solve the problem. I walked around the house multiple times until I found their entrance point. I bought insecticide spray to kill them and hardening foam to seal their entrance point. I also hung a wasp trap in a nearby tree, which quickly captured scores of them in its sticky folds. The first two preventive measures seemed like good ideas, but in fact I made their home invasion worse. By bottling them up, even more of them found their way into the house.
I must give my wife credit for her bravery in the face of this insect invasion. She’s scared to death of spiders. One spider in the shower will send her into paroxysms of fear and loathing. But she remained calm and cooperative in the war on wasps, despite being stung multiple times (they only got me once, when I accidently stepped on one). We eventually closed off the bedroom, slept downstairs in the TV room, and called in the big guns: our pest control company.
By this point I was ready to burn the house down. Or drop a bomb on it. Anything to rid ourselves of these relentless, merciless warriors of the bug world. Whatever the nuclear option was, I was ready to push the button and initiate Armageddon. Burn ’em down or blow ’em up, at whatever cost to pride or property. Fortunately, our pest control guy had a cooler head. And a better, less destructive weapon: poison powder. The war was soon over.
I’ve always had a kind of Buddhist live-and-let-live attitude toward the wild creatures I share my property with, but when bugs or mice invade my home, all philosophical niceties fly out the window and my attitude shifts immediately. When that happens, I get mad as a hornet and murder rules my heart.
Steven Price is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at sprice1953@gmail.com.
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