Three foot wasp nest eats through the pillows and mattress in woman's spare bedroom.
Longwood Services Pest Control
What would you do if you opened up the spare bedroom door and found a three foot wasp nest buzzing away with the activity of approximately 5,000 wasps? It’s definitely not something you see every day. Pest controller, John Birkett reported to the BBC that he had never seen anything quite like that. It was his biggest and most unusual job in his over 45 years of experience.
It’s a good thing that the homeowner called pest control. Removing the wasp nest would have been too dangerous to attempt alone. The pest controller had to close the door as he worked so that wasps did not fill the house when he sprayed and then dismantled the nest. But something happened before the pest controller could begin working. He opened the door and just stood there in amazement, gawking at the incredible phenomenon.
Birkett had to gear up for the task before attacking the swarm. “I got dressed up like a spaceman and tried to destroy as many as I could with the workers flying around the room. In that nest there must have been up to 700 queen wasps," he said.
The wasps had apparently wanted more space for the nest that they had been building for several months and had eaten away at the pillows and the mattress on the bed in the spare bedroom. Somehow, a crocheted blanket was salvageable from the wasps’ destruction and nest building.
The room had been untouched for many months, as the owner lived alone in a five bedroom house, reported The Gaurdian. The wasps had found their way through an open window in the room and loved the place enough to become squatters. In awe and sadness, Birkett told the news that he regretted having to kill them all. "It was a work of art and they had worked so hard,” but the owner was adamant. “You’ve got to get rid of it,” she said.
In Winter Haven, Florida, something similar happened in recent news. An 80 year old woman feared for her life when she’d found a nest of approximately 15,000 yellow jackets who had taken up residence over an old abandoned recliner in her backyard. The woman was so afraid that she didn’t want to return home, despite the yellow jackets having stayed outside. The treatment process for this particular nest was expected to take two days and was reported by the pest controllers to be “off the charts” of anything they had seen in the past. Had the pest controllers not been called, in six months time, the recliner would have been completely taken over by the wasps, causing more concern for danger.
*originally published on the now defunct Examiner.com
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