Yesterday, we noticed several wasps circling the trap, which hadn't caught anything all summer long.
"Maybe they are more aggressive this time of year, and we'll finally get rid of them," I said. "Go in there, little wasps. Follow your friends."
The new location of the trap was right above our back door, and it freaked me out to walk under the swarm to water my outdoor plants.
"You stay there and distract them while I go inside," I told Dan.
I squealed and ducked into the house, accidentally locking him outside with the circling insects. He didn't seem to mind. He stood there, examining them like they were a science experiment.
I have a mild case of PTSD when it come to yellow jackets.
Before Dan and I were married, I lived in an apartment. A bunch of wasps also decided to make my apartment their home, and they sneaked in through a tiny crack in one of the balcony supports and built a nest.
The apartment managers sent an exterminator to spray the post a few times, but because it was hidden inside the infrastructure, they couldn't get to the nest to remove it, and the queen bee thrived and continued to bring more and more wasps into her humble abode on my balcony.
The yellow jackets crawled into my apartment via the light fixtures and the sliding glass door. I would hear a "bzz" over my head, and that was my cue that another wasp had dropped into the dome covering my living room light.
I lived across from three Boise State football players, and one day, when a couple of wasps crawled through my screen door and lit on the glass inside my apartment, I knocked on their door.
I handed one of the guys my Birkenstock, "I have a wasp problem. Can you kill a few of them for me?"
He obliged, but not without a lot of jumping around and shrieking . . . from both of us.
Eventually, I bought some spray, the kind that really should be used outside, and Dan sprayed the entire perimeter of my balcony door and light fixtures. (That's when I decided to keep him.) It helped for about a day.
The yellow jackets never completely died off, but they did slow down once the temperatures dropped. Dan and I got married in December, and I moved out and away from my yellow jacket friends forever.
Meanwhile, in my present situation . . .
The yellow jackets disappeared this morning, possibly and hopefully dead.
I looked up and past the yellow plastic trap.
"Dan," I called to him shakily, "I think I know why we have so many wasps in our backyard right now."
"Whoa!" Dan said. "Did they just build that overnight? I swear it wasn't up there yesterday."
He glanced over at me.
"Why are you standing so weird?"
I was wiggling my lower half and jutting out my right hip.
"I'm getting chills up my butt," I said.
I get "chills up my butt" when something scares me, mostly creepy-crawly or heights-related things. It's hard to describe the sensation. Just go with it.
I wriggled my whole body as if trying to rid it of some demonic presence. Then I squealed and ran inside, leaving Dan outside, mystified and alone with the wasp nest and all of its eggs.
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