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Thursday, June 28, 2007

Wasp Wars--Again

And so the wasp wars continue.

It's been really hot here for the last week, so I've had my windows closed and the air on. Because my friend, the grass-carrying wasp, has been so insistent on building her nest in one of my eastern windows, I did open it every day just to make sure there wasn't anything in there. No grass fell from above and I figured she'd finally given up and moved her nest building attempts elsewhere. I had almost sprayed her with wasp poison right before the hot spell hit.

Oh, how foolish I was.

Yesterday, it finally cooled off enough to open the windows again and still no grass fell from above. Yea! So I'm working with the windows open in the house, enjoying the heck out of it and all is well.

I decided to go to bed early last night, and as I'm shutting the windows for the night, I glance down as I'm turning the crank on her window, and much to my surprise, I found grass jammed in around the lower hinge. Not just grass, but some big, dead bug. (It's for the wasp larvae to feed on. I looked up grass-carrying wasps on the internet.)

Like the big, bad wolf, I tried huffing and puffing to blow out the wasp nest, but that didn't work. My dad didn't leave the leaf blower at my house, so that left one option--my hair dryer!

That almost didn't work. My 1600 watt ion dryer blew out some of it, but the bulk of it stayed locked in place. I started sweeping the dryer, trying different angles. Finally, after a lot of jiggling, I finally cleared out the nest. Whew!

From now on, I'm going to have to check the tops of the windows and the bottoms. Sigh. I'd never heard of grass-carrying wasps before I moved in my house last year and now I'm routinely fighting them off.

BTW, the plan to go to bed early netted me a grand total of maybe 6 hours of sleep. I'm still tired.