As a home owner, I have frequent battles with nature. Mother Nature’s latest assault appears to be a yellow jacket nest near the house. Not the cute tiny yellow jackets that make you curse loudly when you run over their nest with the lawn mower but these are kind that need Rico, Dizzy and Rasczak to show the Orkin man how it’s done. We’ve had 3 of these in the house in the past week:
I know their nests typically have 2 entrances. They return to their nests at dusk. They fly faster than I can run. They tag you with a pheromone when they sting that alerts the rest of the nest that you are a bad guy. They don’t die when they sting like honey bees. And traps near the entrance work as well or better than gasoline down the holes but take longer. One evening this week we will do battle.
I’d better have an epi-pen on hand for you when you do.
I’ll take a couple of your giant yellowjacket nests over my cicada killer infestation (don’t know how to insert the link, so just google it). They suck.
Andrea, those look nasty! (btw, link in the comments works just like an html link <a href="http://domainname.com/">text of link</a>) That gave me the creepy crawlies just looking at the picture.
Don’t yellow jackets kill cicadas? You can have some of our yellow jackets. You should just attract birds to your yard. We could get yellow spotted lizards for our yard. I don’t want bears. We have raccoons and skunks and they are not doing their job.
Oh, we have birds, lots of them, and carpenter bees as well. And mosquitos, black widows (nasty, nasty problem), possum, rabbits, moles (though the cat has taken most of them out, including the rabbits). Nate wants a bat box too. I just want to sit out on my new deck and enjoy myself. Apparently, nature thinks that’s too much to ask.
I noticed the mosquitoes last night and today. I haven’t seen our possum in a long time. The blasted outdoor cat seems to have done away with our resident chipmunks (I’d prefer the chipmunk over the cat). The rabbits only come out a dusk and dawn anymore. The hoot owl hasn’t been heard in a couple of years. We’ve had a bat box for 5 years and had 2 bats flying near the house regularly. I was hoping they’d take residence but the cat killed them. How does a cat kill a bat?! Twice! I have another bat box I’ve been meaning to hang. I seriously want a colony of bats to fight of the mosquitoes. We used to have a couple of huge black snakes in the yard. The neighbor’s dog took out and I accidentally sliced and diced the other bush hogging with the lawnmower (that made me sad). I still hear the raccoons periodically but rarely see them (and I guess that’s for the best). I’ll be wrecking havoc on their habitat this year so I hope! I want to do a lot of work on the yard (at the same time keeping a bit of it wild for the animals).