Very strange coincidence, Crow.
A couple of weeks ago my younger son, Nicholas, told me that there was a crack in his wall, and he could see legs coming through the crack. He has a centipede phobia and thought it was a centipede.
I sent to see what he was talking about, and there was a damp spot on the wall, roughly oval and maybe 10 inches at the longest spot, with a small crack in the center. I touched the wall where it was damp, and could feel that there was nothing behind the paper.
So I called for my husband to get the bug spray, and I got a single edge razor blade, and when Chris came in with the bug spray I started to cut the paper.
Yikes! A bunch of yellow-and-black stinging things, not sure if they were yellow jackets, hornets or wasps, came flying out. Thank God it was almost night!!!! So most of them were probably asleep or settling down for the evening. Chris started spraying as they came out, and I closed the bedroom door and opened the window so they could fly out.
Chris sprayed all the spray into the hole, and then he folded up some aluminum foil until it was very thick, and duct-taped it over the hole, and we went outside to see whether we could see a hole in the wall, and we saw maybe a dozen flying by the chimney, and a hole in the caulking between the siding and the chimney. So we went to the hardware store and got another couple of cans. The lady at the hardware store said she had heard maybe 15 similar stories about wasp-type insects inside the house this year.
When we got back, we peeled back the foil, and opened the hole a little bit more, and a couple more came out, so Chris zapped them, and we covered the hole again.
The next day, while Chris was at work, I peeled back the foil and cut back the paper some more, and it was really gross - maybe a dozen layers of nest, sort of straight across, more visible beyond the hole. No wasps were flying but some of the larvae were wiggling around, so I zapped everything again, and closed up the hole.
Later when he came home, we looked in the attic, and saw two big nests in the attic, too. We also got the shop vac and opened the hole and sucked up everything we could reach, then threw the bag into the garbage can.
I spent the day researching on the Internet - the most likely culprit was yellow jackets. Terminex wanted several hundred dollars to kill them, and did not want to clean out the nest. I called Virginia Tech entomology department and the guy in the Insect lab told me it was probably yellow jackets but since we had already killed them we could clean it out ourselves.
So we waited a couple more days and then opened up the wall and cleaned it all out. Most of the layers were old and dried out, thank God.
They put the nest in a cavity between two joists, with the chimney on one side and the wall on the other. They ATE all the sheetrock insulation in the walls, and all the plaster around the hole. This is not at all uncommon. It was only about 15 inches at the largest part. I have seen much, much bigger ones on the Net. And yellow jackets are extremely dangerous, mean and aggressive.
The one thing I learned is that you should *NEVER* spray the outside hole until you have killed them ALL otherwise they will COME INTO THE HOUSE and it will take days, even weeks, to get rid of them.
This could be a new species of wasp that just came to the US maybe a decade ago, and has been spreading slowly. I am going to send a photo to Virginia Tech and see what they say. |
