The Vespid Chronicles, Vol. II
When we evicted the yellowjacket horde from our house last week, it was a matter of biological competition, and not of personal animosity. Following their instincts, honed by millions of years of evolution, they moved in without asking-and we merely asserted our territorial prerogative. In fact, I almost felt sorry for the last of the survivors slowly crawling across the bedroom carpet, staggering under a lethal dose of that crazy wasp dust. 1 Almost. Until Monday.
As of four days post-extermination, I figured we'd pretty much solved "the yellowjacket problem" (as it has come to be known). My daily search yielded fewer and fewer stragglers, until by Sunday the count had dwindled to one sickly drone in the bedroom and a brace of dead queens in the basement. (Kathy left for a scientific meeting the morning after we had the nest zapped.) But the following evening, a whole host of the venomous brutes, in various stages of advanced death, greeted me on my return home from work. What's worse, they were mostly workers. Either they'd been newly hatched, or had found a way back to the nest; and neither possibility bespoke an ultimately successful extermination. I grumbled and went about my evening's mercy-killings, hoping it was but a fluke. Should've known better. Tuesday brought me a baker's dozen of workers, two of which were as frisky as spring lambs, dive-bombing me from the ceiling and doing barrel rolls around the light fixtures. And even before I had time to get ready the next morning, I discovered five more workers picking their way across the carpet in a bizarre, hexapodal drunken stagger. 2
Now it was personal. I'd finally found the limit of crawling, stinging pests I could accept while maintaining a scientifically-minded disinterest. I began to seethe with raw, virulent hatred. Instead of quickly dispatching the writhing vermin, I carefully leaned down over each one and, with a grand flourish, flipped it off. Let 'em writhe, I said to myself, while I gloat. REVENGE! I resolved to stay home from work on Wednesday, and fix these stripèd cockroaches once and for all. 3
Meanwhile, the rate of yellowjackets trickling down to perish in the basement also sharply increased. Compare Plate 1 (left), the accumulated horde as of Sunday, with Plate 2 (right), taken three days later (click on thumbnails for large versions). (I allowed the corpses to pile up as gruesome evidence that Operation Deth Fest had gone into overtime.)
A call to Dave the exterminator confirmed what I'd already feared: he couldn't help us, short of soaking the entire room with toxic chemicals, until we figured out how the little bastards were getting in. The yellowjackets themselves had little information to provide on the matter: by the time I found them, they'd had hours to distribute themselves fairly evenly across the room. Nonetheless, they had been slightly more concentrated in two areas: below the window next to my side of the bed, and near the foot of the bed on Kathy's side.
Now even before I called Dave last week, I'd carried out a survey of all the baseboards and windowsills, and hadn't found any likely entry points. This time around I pulled all the furniture well away from the walls, carried the mattress out into the hall, and carefully scoped every square centimeter of the walls and floors. My search revealed only two conceivable entrances: an unoccupied phone jack behind the bedstead, and the heat register on Kathy's side of the bed. Previously, I'd discounted the latter, because the heating ducts were supposedly air- and therefore yellowjacket-tight, and because the slats of the vent looked too narrow to pass even the workers. Yet they were getting in somehow, and phone jacks do not typically afford passage through the wall, and so there was nothing for it but to seal the vent (Plate 3). (Just to be safe, I sealed the jack using a phone cord we had lying around.)
I wanted to make sure, however, that the register really was the port of access: I couldn't just slap a big, ugly piece of duct tape across it, since then we'd never know. Using a plastic grocery bag, masking tape and ingenuity born of desperation, I fashioned a receptacle for any wayward yellowjackets who couldn't be bothered to go die in privacy (Plate 4; any resemblance to a colostomy bag is strictly unintentional). Inside, I placed several sticky traps of masking tape in hopes of immobilizing the occupants, who would otherwise instinctively fly upward into my face when I opened up the bag later on to check how the harvest was coming along.
Everything appeared most satisfactory, except that it was impossible to see inside the bag without sliding a light source underneath. To verify that I'd made a good seal around the edges, I cranked up the heat and monitored how well the bag kept the air in. I'd done such a good job sealing it up, in fact, that I had to add a small vent hole by peeling back the tape a bit (Plate 5).
Now it was just a matter of lying low for a while to see what would find its way into the bag. While I revised lectures for my spring-semester class, I periodically scanned the bedroom for new yellowjackets, either trapped or free. Nothing. But there were no live creepy-crawlies on the carpet, which already represented a vast improvement in the vermin situation.
Just before dinnertime Kathy and her sister arrived home from the airport. I led the spouse up to the torn-up bedroom, climbing over bookcases heaped up in the center and sidestepping mattresses propped up against walls, and showed her my great accomplishment for the day. Drat-the heat had shut down, and the grocery bag had completely deflated, allowing its ceiling to adhere to my interior tape traps. As I gently pulled the top side away from the tape, we were startled by the rattling buzz of wings beating against plastic. Triumph!
Unfortunately, hearing that enticing whirr, the cats were drawn to the trap as if it were a black hole. And of course their first order of business, if left to their own devices, would be to claw a gigantic hole in the bag, instantly negating all my painstaking work. I hadn't gone to all this trouble, sacrificing half our bedroom's heat supply to boot, to build a cat toy. We couldn't close off the bedroom entirely, as it would soon become the coldest room in the house. And whatever barrier I erected between the cats and the yellowjacket receptacle would have to stand up to cats pushing at it with all their strength and attempting to work their paws around and underneath it.
As it happened the solution was almost comically simple. I cut the top half out of one side of a box from Amazon.com (we keep one handy of every conceivable size precisely for emergencies like this), placed the modified box atop the heat vent, and secured it with some ninety pounds (40 kg) of cat-thwarting ballast (Plate 6).
I've named this assemblage the Sarcophagus for reasons that I hope are self-evident. It serves much the same function, too-although I intended it more to keep the cats out than to keep the yellowjackets in. It's also good to know that all our hefty college science textbooks are still good for something besides inducing a minuscule, albeit perceptible, wobble in the Earth's rotation.
And, joy of joys, the Sarcophagus has held firm for three full days now. I reckon we can remove the Sarcophagus and take stock as soon as the slow trickle of corpses and near-corpses accumulating down in the basement finally peters out. Here's hoping that happens before midwinter.
Postscript. By an amazing coincidence, Kathy's family had to get their house sprayed for "flying stingers" merely two days after we did. Their exterminator-even less dedicated an entomologist than ours-claimed that they had a "bee" infestation. News of my recently-acquired skills at classifying Vespidae had by that time reached the sister-in-law, who kindly preserved a couple (hundred) specimens for me to try my hand at identifying. I didn't have as much luck with them, alas. Seen head-on, the worker I examined was a dead ringer for this Dolichovespula arenaria specimen (scroll down), and the long antennae were consistent with the same species. The abdomen, however, was much more beelike than yellowjacketlike, its alternating dark stripes a rich burnt-orange rather than black.
While rummaging around the Net for yellowjacket pictures, I stumbled across this handy guide to Northwest US yellowjackets. It contains the best checklist for species identification for the non-entomologist I've seen yet. Given a magnifying glass, it doesn't appear to be difficult at all to separate the various critters, though the identifying features are hardly ever what I've noticed. Instead, a great deal of attention is given to the markings around the eyes and antennae. Oh well-as long as they aren't stinging me or crawling around on my bare skin, I'm just as happy not knowing exactly who is who in the yellowjacket world.
________________________
1I've tried to administer a quick, merciful death to these poor creatures, but it turns out that anything that small and heavily armored is nearly impossible to dispatch on shag carpeting. Try and stomp 'em, and both the rug and yellowjacket spring right back up, making the latter look anguished but not conferring the desired release from the mortal plane. The only solution is to "scruff" them with a rough backwards scrape with a tennis-shod foot, in the manner of an enraged bull pawing at the ground. That makes for a clean kill, in the figurative but not literal meaning of the term-as head, thorax and abdomen all sail off in different directions, but always somehow winding up in the dimmest, least accessible corner of the room.
2As I told cutiepi314, I'd never considered how easy it would be to trip over your own feet if you had six of them. Even looking at the underside the dead yellowjackets freaks me out. Way too many gaily painted, jointed legs bending every which way. And that slow death dance, with every limb reflexively and independently clutching at some invisible surface, like spindly, jointed tentacles-brrrrr!
3A torrential rainstorm, plus my inability to hitch a ride to work with Kathy, also helped convince me that I was destined to stay home.
As of four days post-extermination, I figured we'd pretty much solved "the yellowjacket problem" (as it has come to be known). My daily search yielded fewer and fewer stragglers, until by Sunday the count had dwindled to one sickly drone in the bedroom and a brace of dead queens in the basement. (Kathy left for a scientific meeting the morning after we had the nest zapped.) But the following evening, a whole host of the venomous brutes, in various stages of advanced death, greeted me on my return home from work. What's worse, they were mostly workers. Either they'd been newly hatched, or had found a way back to the nest; and neither possibility bespoke an ultimately successful extermination. I grumbled and went about my evening's mercy-killings, hoping it was but a fluke. Should've known better. Tuesday brought me a baker's dozen of workers, two of which were as frisky as spring lambs, dive-bombing me from the ceiling and doing barrel rolls around the light fixtures. And even before I had time to get ready the next morning, I discovered five more workers picking their way across the carpet in a bizarre, hexapodal drunken stagger. 2
Now it was personal. I'd finally found the limit of crawling, stinging pests I could accept while maintaining a scientifically-minded disinterest. I began to seethe with raw, virulent hatred. Instead of quickly dispatching the writhing vermin, I carefully leaned down over each one and, with a grand flourish, flipped it off. Let 'em writhe, I said to myself, while I gloat. REVENGE! I resolved to stay home from work on Wednesday, and fix these stripèd cockroaches once and for all. 3
Meanwhile, the rate of yellowjackets trickling down to perish in the basement also sharply increased. Compare Plate 1 (left), the accumulated horde as of Sunday, with Plate 2 (right), taken three days later (click on thumbnails for large versions). (I allowed the corpses to pile up as gruesome evidence that Operation Deth Fest had gone into overtime.)
A call to Dave the exterminator confirmed what I'd already feared: he couldn't help us, short of soaking the entire room with toxic chemicals, until we figured out how the little bastards were getting in. The yellowjackets themselves had little information to provide on the matter: by the time I found them, they'd had hours to distribute themselves fairly evenly across the room. Nonetheless, they had been slightly more concentrated in two areas: below the window next to my side of the bed, and near the foot of the bed on Kathy's side.
Now even before I called Dave last week, I'd carried out a survey of all the baseboards and windowsills, and hadn't found any likely entry points. This time around I pulled all the furniture well away from the walls, carried the mattress out into the hall, and carefully scoped every square centimeter of the walls and floors. My search revealed only two conceivable entrances: an unoccupied phone jack behind the bedstead, and the heat register on Kathy's side of the bed. Previously, I'd discounted the latter, because the heating ducts were supposedly air- and therefore yellowjacket-tight, and because the slats of the vent looked too narrow to pass even the workers. Yet they were getting in somehow, and phone jacks do not typically afford passage through the wall, and so there was nothing for it but to seal the vent (Plate 3). (Just to be safe, I sealed the jack using a phone cord we had lying around.)
I wanted to make sure, however, that the register really was the port of access: I couldn't just slap a big, ugly piece of duct tape across it, since then we'd never know. Using a plastic grocery bag, masking tape and ingenuity born of desperation, I fashioned a receptacle for any wayward yellowjackets who couldn't be bothered to go die in privacy (Plate 4; any resemblance to a colostomy bag is strictly unintentional). Inside, I placed several sticky traps of masking tape in hopes of immobilizing the occupants, who would otherwise instinctively fly upward into my face when I opened up the bag later on to check how the harvest was coming along.
Everything appeared most satisfactory, except that it was impossible to see inside the bag without sliding a light source underneath. To verify that I'd made a good seal around the edges, I cranked up the heat and monitored how well the bag kept the air in. I'd done such a good job sealing it up, in fact, that I had to add a small vent hole by peeling back the tape a bit (Plate 5).
Now it was just a matter of lying low for a while to see what would find its way into the bag. While I revised lectures for my spring-semester class, I periodically scanned the bedroom for new yellowjackets, either trapped or free. Nothing. But there were no live creepy-crawlies on the carpet, which already represented a vast improvement in the vermin situation.
Just before dinnertime Kathy and her sister arrived home from the airport. I led the spouse up to the torn-up bedroom, climbing over bookcases heaped up in the center and sidestepping mattresses propped up against walls, and showed her my great accomplishment for the day. Drat-the heat had shut down, and the grocery bag had completely deflated, allowing its ceiling to adhere to my interior tape traps. As I gently pulled the top side away from the tape, we were startled by the rattling buzz of wings beating against plastic. Triumph!
Unfortunately, hearing that enticing whirr, the cats were drawn to the trap as if it were a black hole. And of course their first order of business, if left to their own devices, would be to claw a gigantic hole in the bag, instantly negating all my painstaking work. I hadn't gone to all this trouble, sacrificing half our bedroom's heat supply to boot, to build a cat toy. We couldn't close off the bedroom entirely, as it would soon become the coldest room in the house. And whatever barrier I erected between the cats and the yellowjacket receptacle would have to stand up to cats pushing at it with all their strength and attempting to work their paws around and underneath it.
As it happened the solution was almost comically simple. I cut the top half out of one side of a box from Amazon.com (we keep one handy of every conceivable size precisely for emergencies like this), placed the modified box atop the heat vent, and secured it with some ninety pounds (40 kg) of cat-thwarting ballast (Plate 6).
I've named this assemblage the Sarcophagus for reasons that I hope are self-evident. It serves much the same function, too-although I intended it more to keep the cats out than to keep the yellowjackets in. It's also good to know that all our hefty college science textbooks are still good for something besides inducing a minuscule, albeit perceptible, wobble in the Earth's rotation.
And, joy of joys, the Sarcophagus has held firm for three full days now. I reckon we can remove the Sarcophagus and take stock as soon as the slow trickle of corpses and near-corpses accumulating down in the basement finally peters out. Here's hoping that happens before midwinter.
Postscript. By an amazing coincidence, Kathy's family had to get their house sprayed for "flying stingers" merely two days after we did. Their exterminator-even less dedicated an entomologist than ours-claimed that they had a "bee" infestation. News of my recently-acquired skills at classifying Vespidae had by that time reached the sister-in-law, who kindly preserved a couple (hundred) specimens for me to try my hand at identifying. I didn't have as much luck with them, alas. Seen head-on, the worker I examined was a dead ringer for this Dolichovespula arenaria specimen (scroll down), and the long antennae were consistent with the same species. The abdomen, however, was much more beelike than yellowjacketlike, its alternating dark stripes a rich burnt-orange rather than black.
While rummaging around the Net for yellowjacket pictures, I stumbled across this handy guide to Northwest US yellowjackets. It contains the best checklist for species identification for the non-entomologist I've seen yet. Given a magnifying glass, it doesn't appear to be difficult at all to separate the various critters, though the identifying features are hardly ever what I've noticed. Instead, a great deal of attention is given to the markings around the eyes and antennae. Oh well-as long as they aren't stinging me or crawling around on my bare skin, I'm just as happy not knowing exactly who is who in the yellowjacket world.
________________________
1I've tried to administer a quick, merciful death to these poor creatures, but it turns out that anything that small and heavily armored is nearly impossible to dispatch on shag carpeting. Try and stomp 'em, and both the rug and yellowjacket spring right back up, making the latter look anguished but not conferring the desired release from the mortal plane. The only solution is to "scruff" them with a rough backwards scrape with a tennis-shod foot, in the manner of an enraged bull pawing at the ground. That makes for a clean kill, in the figurative but not literal meaning of the term-as head, thorax and abdomen all sail off in different directions, but always somehow winding up in the dimmest, least accessible corner of the room.
2As I told cutiepi314, I'd never considered how easy it would be to trip over your own feet if you had six of them. Even looking at the underside the dead yellowjackets freaks me out. Way too many gaily painted, jointed legs bending every which way. And that slow death dance, with every limb reflexively and independently clutching at some invisible surface, like spindly, jointed tentacles-brrrrr!
3A torrential rainstorm, plus my inability to hitch a ride to work with Kathy, also helped convince me that I was destined to stay home.