Die Wasps, Die!!

If you are member of the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Wasps look away now, for the next few paragraphs may sear your very iris’s due to their graphic and violent nature.
We have a serious wasp problem at our house. At any one time there are three or four stealthing around, hiding in curtains, crawling up shirt collars, hanging around hair brushes.
There was a time when I thought all God’s creatures deserved peace and an equal place on earth. That was before our wasp dilemma turned me into a ruthless killing machine. The husband and I have a body count. I’m winning. He uses the Derry Journal which only serves to stun the little buggers. I use a nice thick glossy like Elle Magazine which sends them off to that can of fizzy orange in the sky before they even know what hit them.
He does get points for drama though and has effectively built us up a strong reputation for being a household who won’t take this yearly invasion lying down. He has pinned a dead wasp to the back door to strike fear into hearts of the other foolhardy wasps who may think of venturing inside. He’s also got a handwritten warning sign up there to let them know what we are really capable of, complete with graphic drawings of wasps in various states of decapitation.
For all these pesky wasps have accomplished over their evolutionary journey I doubt they have mastered the power of speech, learned to read or decipher diagrams. But it makes the husband feel better and in all honesty I have witnessed a few wasps come to the door, read the sign and buzz away shaking their little furry heads.
What are wasps for anyway apart from making people look stupid in the street? Have you ever noticed how the arrival of a wasp beside someone’s ear flicks a switch in their head turning them into really bad wedding disco dancers? There all waving hands in the air like they just don’t care and doing the knees-up spinning around jig like your young, drunken cousins used to when the DJ put a Pogues number on.
For the next few weeks we’ll have to try every trick in the box to keep our house from being overrun by winged beasts.
Last year was, let’s be honest here, a laughable disaster.
My husband and father found a wasp’s nest in the remnants of a tree stump in our garden and felt throwing buckets of floral disinfectant over it while hitting the nest with a spade might kill them. They were more likely to have laughed themselves to death, but there seemed to be a lot more of them around afterwards. Many, many sweet smelling wasps with sore heads looking for revenge.
The year before that we had the husband’s brother tackle the problem. He found the nest in the eaves of the house. He put it in a plastic bag, then in a bucket, filled it with water, set it on fire and then hit it with a spade. There were many, many angry wasps with scorched eyebrows and wet feet hanging around looking mean after that.
But every year they still come back for more.
I may take the pacifist approach this time. I may call them to the table and thrash out a deal. Yeah, with my Elle Magazine.....