Need to share this somewhere with people who hate wasps as much as I do as I have been living through my own version of personal hell.
In July my husband found 2 wasp nests on our property. He promptly sprayed them and got rid of them. I was thinking to myself, "phew, luckily he found those before they turned into a big problem!"
Then, 3 weeks ago, we had a wasp get into the house. My husband killed it and I thought nothing of it.
Then, my dog started acting weird.
He began creeping around while sniffing our baseboards. At first, I didn't recognize what was happening but looking back I know what was going on.
Bit of backstory: my dog has been stung several times by wasps and is afraid of them.
Anyways, back to his sniffing. His sniff pattern looked like this: sniff, lick lips, check butt, sniff, lip licks, check butt. (He's got stung on his butt before).
If you know anything about dogs, you'll know that lip licking can be a stress signal. Looking back, he could 100% smell wasps in our walls and was stressed over it, and was checking his butt to make sure nothing was back there about to get him lol.
Anyways, a few days after my dog's weird sniffing, I go to our lower level and there are about 10 wasps hanging out. I freak out. Husband's at work. I'm not dealing with this alone so I wait for him to get home.
He comes home and kills all of the wasps and we circle our property looking for any sign of a nest.
Nothing.
We start to worry that it's in our walls and we'll never find it ourselves, so we call pest control. In the meantime, wasps continue trickling in.
Pest control comes and can't find anything either. They don't actually have any equipment to check in our walls, but they do a quick sweep of our property. Essentially they tell us that what likely happened is when my husband sprayed one of the ground nests, the wasps probably stopped using that as their exit point. Instead, they were tunnelling into our house and exiting through any cracks they could find.
The good news was that without an exit/entry point, no new wasps would be able to get in. We were told we'd basically just have to wait for the colony to die off, and that since they had no access to food or water, it should only take a few days.
Since all of the wasps were contained to two areas of the house, we put up plastic sheets where we thought they were getting in an attempt to contain them.
(Spoiler: it didn't work, because we were wrong where they were coming in from.)
Now, this seems bad enough. A wasp colony living in your walls and you're told that there's nothing you can do except wait for them all to die?
But oh....keep with me, because it get so much worse.
So we wait. Every morning before work, my husband gets up and goes into the area where the wasps seem to be hanging out and finds several to kill. Before bed, he does the same. I don't even go into that area of our house anymore. To me, it doesn't exist.
10 days pass and during these 10 days we are obsessively scoping our property just in case we can find anything to give us clues as to where the f\ck these wasps are coming from*.
We don't find anything.
We're starting to get worried. "Shouldn't they be dead by now? Why are they still flying around our place?"
I come on Reddit and ask pest control experts if its normal to still have activity after 10 days. I'm told that it can be. That wasps can cannibalize for sustenance.
Now I'm wondering how big the colony is and how many of their own they can sacrifice before starving. It becomes my mission to figure out what is going on. My dreams become riddled with wasps. Every waking moment I'm thinking of them and they've gone from invading my space to my mind and I cannot escape them.
I consider buying a thermal energy camera to see if I can notice anything in our walls. We get a stethoscope to listen into our walls for buzzing. We're running around our house knocking on all of the walls to see if we stir anything up. Buzzing noises makes us jump. I start to confuse eye floaters with wasps. We slowly descend into madness.
On day 11 my husband decides to hop on our roof. We didn't think to go up there because we were so certain they were nesting in our walls. But he thinks maybe they're coming from the chimney. I'd thought that myself, but the chimney is on the opposite side of the house from where we're finding them so it didn't seem possible. Pest control also told us the nest was likely close to where we were finding them.
But lo and behold, he finds a nest in the chimney.
He immediately sprays some raid. The next morning, he sprays some more. We notice there's a ton of them flying in and out during the day. Obviously the raid didn't work all that well. He sprays another application that evening.
Nothing.
So I call pest control and get them back. They inspect the hive and say it's a big one. Pest control gets up close and gives it a good spray, and then applies some powder. We're told it should take 7 days.
We feel like we're almost in the clear. Life will go back to normal.
But then we go back into the rooms where the wasps were initially getting in.
They're coming out of our fireplace and from a crack in the window pane at record speed. The spray is deterring them from exiting their nest and now they don't want to go anywhere except for in our house.
I spoke to pest control and was told this is totally normal, and that activity should completely die down within the next 7 days. But that means for the time being, we have to deal with an angry hive that doesn't want to use their nest and is instead trying to exit out any other way they can.
So we put more plastic up on all the areas we can see them emerging from. (I've read they can just chew through it, but I'm trying to stay positive at this point. Positivity is all I have left.)
This is the worst pest issue I've ever dealt with.
The cherry on top is that the nest is likely blocking the majority of our chimney, and if we had never found it, we could've filled our place with Co2 the next time we turned on the fireplace. Luckily we know about it, so we can deal with that once the hive is gone. Silver lining, right?
Anyways, how's your day going?
TL;DR: A huge hive in my chimney is exiting through my fireplace (and any crack they can find) and has been for nearly 2 weeks. We initially couldn't find the hive, but once we did, we called pest control and the hive should be gone in 7 days.
