Friday, August 26, 2016

The Gauntlet of Summer

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As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.


This is probably a unique problem here, but if others have it, this is how we deal with it.

Mom's house is a homesteader house. It is poorly designed, is  something I have never liked, and we had bees in the roof when I was growing up, and now have wasps and hornets.

Yes I spray the hornets, but the wasps are a necessity as they eat black widow spiders. I leave the mud daubers alone,  as long as they do not come into the house, but they have a proclivity for it and once in I am not going to let them out.

It is dangerous to swat them. It is not something I am going to do in spraying Raid to poison us, so while I do have a bug zapper with a light, that fries them......smells like burned dog hair and still does not kill them, this is the key.

Wasps fly toward light, so one turns off the light. They then  fly toward the window, where I then carefully trap them with a wide mouth canning jar....slide over the mouth as it is on the window one of those junk mail postcards and then slide a canning lid top over that, and then cap it up.
They get madder than a hornet literally, and no mistakes are allowed as those daubers come for revenge if they ever get loose.

The black or deep blue wasps are the ones I do my utmost to protect. They have never stung me, and I fondly remember them in the garden on potato plants. They are not aggressive, but seem to have the intelligence of the daubers, in the last one I had in here, I shut off the lights, and it flew to the kitchen, then the porch door, and I opened it, and out it went, to never return.

Wasps are necessary in eating spiders in the predatory chain. I leave the daubers at peace if they leave me at peace. The hornets, I will kill every one of those paper hanging bastards I can spray. Last year while butchering chickens they maliciously stung me like 3 times just for spite. Nothing redemptive about a colony bug with stingers that does not produce honey and looks like a fat Hillary Clinton on welfare taking a village to raise a hornet.

Oh and in the hornets outside, if you wait for like 60 degree weather, they are sluggish and you can really do the deed on them then.

I just have to be careful in this as the black blue wasps are a great benefit as a predator, so it means selective pesticide and canning jars in running the gauntlet of summer.



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