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Let your next career move come to you.

Wurgh

I had to get up into the loft because there was a problem with the TV reception. The aerial goes into a booster box in there and the connection was fooked up so we got that annoying digital pixilation shite. Anyway, it involves clambering the length of the loft and through timber joists. I must get it moved somewhere more sensible.
Problem one is that there are long eared and horseshoe bats in there.   They flap at your face as you enter. Yikes. Anyway, they fooked off after a bit when they realised I wasn't leaving. But I could hear this weird noise while I was working on the box and thought it was the wind. As I refitted the cable , I became aware that there were things flying about. I shone my torch. HUGE wasps nest gaping open. Wasps pouring out like a tap had been opened. Suddenly they are all up and about.

I moved rather fast. Miraculously no stings.

Then I got the beekeeping suit on and got back up there - rather anxiously - and sprayed the nest and puffed loads of murdering powder about. 

clubbers

yes, that is precisely it. The wasps invade my beehives. They carry back the heads of the young emergers which are just on their way out of their cells and therefore soft and weak, and just as they poke their heads out the wasps arrive, oblivious to stings from the workers, and bite off the soft juicy heads and suck out the insides of the thorax and abdomen. They then fly back with the heads to feed to their own grubs.

For that and many, many more reasons, but that above all, I kill wasps when I find them.

I’ve had a couple of similar wasp based experiences whilst in attic spaces.  Always poke your head through the hatch and check for wasp nests before heading in.

Hmm. Progress report. 

for the last three days I have been trying to sort out a shit signal from a digital supply that goes through my roof space. each time I have been up in the loft there seem to have been more and more wasps and some Hornets but I thought I had removed all of the nests. I couldn’t find any more blobs.

So this morning I hung out of my bathroom window for a few minutes looking at the roof tiles outside as the sun warmed them up and noticed where the wasps were coming in and realised I had not looked round that corner in the roof space.

Tonight I clambered all the way to the far end of the roof space and turned right at the gable end and there, hanging off the gable, was a wasps nest the size of a beachball, crawling with nesting fookers. Huge. And I was a five minute clamber away from the exit. So, what to do.
 

I took a long handled fork to ram into and rake the nest and some chemicals. I put on my bee keeping suit to avoid stings. As I clambered in and over the roof frames the long eared bats were bombarding me. 

I have now used the contents of an entire two cans of wasp nest destroying foam spray, two cans of powder that creates a toxic atmosphere for wasps and human visitors to the roof, and one can of spray for killing wasps in flight.

I don’t feel very well. but I suspect I feel better than those bastards who have been raiding my bee hives. 

I love these tales. Keep them coming. I hope it doesn't turn out that Muttley doesn't turn out to be a Teclis sock-puppet living in an Eastbourne council bedsit. 

For any other poster this would simply read as a long and coded message saying

 

LOOK HOW BIG MY HOUSE IS YOU fookERS.

IT TAKES ME TEN MINUTES JUST TO NAVIGATE THE fookING ATTIC.

be careful m88, it was discovered a few years ago that the UK is not free of bat rabies, as previously thought. Some UK species carry a form of the european lyssavirus that is clinically identical to rabies. Yet you’re not allowed to exterminate the filthy, pestilence carrying little sky-rats if they decide to infest your loft, because well who the fook knows why, it’s not like there aren’t 1000 other places they could live with their disgusting endemic viruses.

I had similar actually. Went into the loft the other day and found bats nesting (short-eared, long-eared and medium-eared), alongside a badger set and a small horse paddock that I didn't realise I had. At this point I was 9 minutes from the loft exit, so fearing for my safety I turned around and trudged back. I could see wasps but didn't know where they were nesting, so I ended up painting my youngest black and hanging him from one of the rafters. After a few nips the bats accepted him as one of their own and left him to it. I kept him there for a night then got him to report back on what he'd witnessed. Turns out that the wasps were using the horses to travel down to the far end of the attic, just past the second gable. Clever buggers. Anyway, I jogged down there and used four cans of wasp nest destroying foam, three cans of toxic powder and five cans of wasp spray. I think that'll do it.

I hope it does anyway, at the end of this week I'm heading back to the main residence.

"oh yeah, another thing. I put some mouse traps up there. One had a victim in it, but head only. Head only.  Something was EATING THE REST OF THE CARCASS...."

 

 

Sorry.

I was hungry.

I put a mousetrap down a few days ago under a floorboard in the youngest boy's bedroom. I took it back yesterday with a dead mouse in it. 

Still mire scrating though so another needs to go back.

I find that the best bait by far is Nutella. It works a treat.

 

I also love the "and medium-eared" line which is all the better for the emphatic italics.

The wasps have lost this battle. None at all flying around outside the nest today and all is silent in the loft. The place looks like a snowcave now, though, as the powder is everywhere.

An aerial engineer is coming to get to grips with the tech issue, hence the need to rid the place of wasps.

 

In response to bananaman and dogwarden, thank you doggers for that vote of confidence but that was our old rental house when we were doing work on this and if I am honest I am not as charming as I used to be...

many. It's wasp HQ round here. something to do with the surrounding woodland I suspect, and the fact that this is a clean and warm space in a damp and open set of fields and woods, with a ready supply of bee larvae in well packaged colonies only 200m away.  The total count in the past 8 years is

- one large one found in the roof of the garage and removed 2 years ago.

- A hornet nest a year ago removed in a sort of dovecote thingummy that stands in the garden and is a home to nesting bluetits mainly. They came out fighting. They like to hit you in the face like a bullet. They fly straight.

- one this spring inside a clematis on a wooden pergola in its early stages, removed and they got fookin angry about it.

- One in the timber cladding at the porch last summer which I couldn't get to but could squirt foam in and they didn't like it up em.

- Three previous ones in the roof space described above,

- then this totally massive beachball of a thing that frankly is a work of genius by those critters but was not welcome in any sense. 

 

 

that is a lot.

so, analysing the situation, I think I have described the arrangements entirely wrongly above.  I actually live in a wasps' nest. Occasionally I have territorial battles, but pretty much they own the place. 

As an aside, can't you be told off by the Feds for dusting a bat colony in the insect equivalent of agent orange?  I bet you were humming ride of the valkries and shouting ho jo to hi-hassan motherbitches

Well.  Having read through this thread in its entirety (thank you btw to whoever it was that name checked me that was lovely) I have decided that I may never sleep again,

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