Hornet's Nest

If I were to tell you this about a hornet what would you think?

"...their aggressively defensive nature makes them a threat to humans who wander too close to a nest or when a nest is constructed too close to human habitation. They vigorously defend the nest, with workers stinging repeatedly, as is common among social bees and wasps. However, the baldfaced hornet has a unique defense in that it can squirt venom from the stinger into the eyes of vertebrate nest intruders. The venom causes immediate watering of the eyes and temporary blindness."

Not too appealing is it?  Well now imagine you find a nest the size of a small football right outside the bedroom window.  Yeah, I think you’d want to get rid of that.  Well that is what happened this weekend. 

As I was finishing up cutting the grass and trimming around the fence and bricks, I happened to see a wasp/hornet fly into a small space between the soffit and facia in the front of the house.  So I decided I should take a walk around the house and just check for more wasp nests.  I had actually walked into that start of one in the shed about a week earlier.  In walking around the house, I happened to look up by Sarah’s room and see a nest the size of a Nerf football stuck between the soffit and the siding right around the corner from her window.

After observing it for a few minutes I watched several wasps fly in and out.  I grabbed the ladder and climbed up for a closer look and noticed the flying insects were black and white, not black and yellow, and quite large.  So I went inside to look them up and came up with the bald-faced hornet.  Not something you want flying around where people are.  So, unfortunately for the hornets, I got out the cans of spray poison and went to town on the nest.  I didn’t know exactly how much to use since it was a fully formed nest and wasn’t sure if it would soak into the “paper” and kill anything inside, so to be safe, I soaked it.  I used up almost an entire can. 

A few hornets dropped out and rolled down the shingles while some more flew out and then just took a dive.  Once there was no activity around the nest for about five minutes, I went on for the ice scraper and knocked it completely down.  There were still a couple more that fell out of the nest, but they were virtually dead already.  There were also several larvae that fell out and into the gutter, which I washed down when I was trying to clean everything up.  Scratch one hornet’s nest.  I have to be better at checking at least once a week to make sure that no other nests/hives are being made anywhere.