Let me preface this by saying bugs don’t creep me out. I can pick up spiders (even non-biting tarantulas, too cool.) I can handle big snakes, rats, mice, whatever. But when I was eight I was swarmed by bees, stung quite badly, and by god I get all stupid & girly around little black & yellow flying insects. All I have to do is conjure up a picture of a bee or wasp in my head & I get goosebumps.
So I come home & there is a dangly legged yellowjacket the size of a Buick in my bedroom. After much silly shrieking & hopping around, I finally swatted it with a Tshirt, hoping to be able to stomp it to bits once down. (I’m the only one home, so the dirty deed was up to me.)
It disappeared. Somewhere in my room, now, there is an irritated yellowjacket. It could be on a piece of clothing hanging in the closet, in my bedding, in a shoe…God knows. Window’s closed…I did look for it but can’t find it. Until I see that thing dead with my own eyes I am NOT sleeping in my bedroom tonight.
Unless someone has a neat trick to lure it from its hiding place…hey, could you just come over to my house & hunt it down & kill it for me, pretty please?
I’m the same way. Last summer I opened my cat room door after feeding my cats and I was eye-to-eye with one of those beasts…IT WAS FLYING RIGHT AT ME…I slammed the door shut and spent the rest of the day locked in the cat room. I finally crept out and cornered it and opened a window and it flew out. Yikes! Cats didn’t help one bit, either.
The dangly-leg bit means it is probably a paper wasp and those aren’t as mean as the regular wasps or hornets though, so you might be safe®. Good luck!
There is only one way to deal with the killers and the spoilers—with a U.S. Marshall and the smell of GUNSMOKE. In the case of yellow jackets you knock ‘em down with a newspaper and stomp on ‘em. It’s a good idea to wear shoes for this. If you have a hive, there is any number of commercial aerosol products that work.
If you’re a serious environmentalist forget I even mentioned this but, have you considered a bug bomb Carina? I get wasps in the house every other year and bug bombs take care of the problem better than anything else.
Brrr. On two different occasions this spring I was going to bed when a wasp showed up in my bedroom. The first time I must have been a sight, chasing it around with a broom and then smashing it against the window with a book. Then I had very bad wasp dreams! The second time I got lucky and got it against the wall within a minute, and again had bad wasp dreams. I’m not sure how they got in but I sprayed around the windows and in the air vents (you never know!) just in case. I bet they flew in the door, but whatever, these are WASPS, and I am unreasonable when wasps are around.
I now have a can of indoor wasp spray by my bed in case of another invasion. I am PETRIFIED of wasps!
No, my cats have the run of the house, but I keep the food and litter boxes in a spare bedroom so the dogs don’t get in there…the bedroom has two doors, one opens into the main part of the house and the other door (always open) opens into the bedroom and back area of the house where the dogs aren’t allowed. So the cats can go anywhere they please, but the dogs are restricted to our main room and the kitchen & basement. Of course they also get the whole yard too.
I respect wasps in the same way that I respect ax murderers. They play a part in Creation, I just really prefer that place to be far away from me.
My best memory of the difference between a wasp’s temperament and the temperament of every other insect I can think of was from doing a science fair project in fourth or fifth grade on bugs. Which consisted primarily of catching a big variety, pinning them to styrofoam slabs with identifying labels (when they could be identified; some I never did manage to figure out with all the library books available to me–it was also eye-opening as to just how many different kinds of creepy crawlies there are out there). Now, of course you killed them first before pinning them, not by smooshing but by closing them up in a jar with no air holes, also containing some cotton soaked in ether. (It was handy having a mom who worked in the hospital. When I did a later science fair bit on fungus, she brought cheerful medical textbooks with large cheerful color photos of what advanced fungal infections looked like, including a very memorable one of the eye. Happy Mother’s Day, mom!) All of the bugs pretty much just sorta crawled around slowly for awhile, then died peacably.
The wasp buzzed briefly, then went stark raving insane, ricocheting back and forth in the jar at the approximate speed of an electron. It was very clearly pissed off, not going down without a fight, and I remain convinced it was doing its level best to break through the glass in order to sting a tunnel directly through each human looking at it.
We used to get them in the house fairly regularly, and all became adept at herding them out the door, and/or the multiple vicious slam technique with the flyswatter. (WHAM! bzzz WHAM! bzzz WHAM. bz… “It’s a trick. Get an ax.”) So, my sympathies.
It’s big spiders that creep me out around here. And we do get them BIG. An Australian huntsman spider made it’s way to my little corner of the world in the 1920s, and stayed. Today, we call it the Avondale spider (small tiddlers of the ilk appeared in Arachnophobia, so I’ve heard tell.)
One night, I switched on the outside light to the back door, and the entire lower pane of the three-pane glass door was covered by the spread of one spider. I kid you not. A kid a few years ago had a local paper article where, for a science fair, he caught a spider and spread it across a dinner plate. The legs touched the circumference, no sweat.
Bees and wasps, I either shoo out or kill. But Avondale Spiders … er, I run. Fast. They’re harmless, I know, but I’ll just – er – wait 'till they want to leave, y’know?
And then, there are wetas. But that’s another story …
1: Put on a light in the room at night and the wasp will often come to the night or near it.
2: An electric leaf blower on high used around your room will do wonders to flush the wasp from it’s hiding place. Bonus is that it dusts the room at the same time.
3: If there is a window in the room during daylight the wasp will probably go for the window pane.
I slept on the couch last night. However my roomie Joe came home & promises to do a scouting mission in my room this morning.
I paint houses, so we “eliminate” hundreds of wasps as part of the job during the summer. I don’t have a big problem if I can blast them with the killer spray from 25’ away (shell I try to be sensitive to the environment, within reason!). In fact I carry a case of the outdoor wasp killer in my truck.
It’s when it’s hiding in my bedroom I get nervous…
Ironically, I have never been stung by one. And apart from when I was swarmed, I’ve been stung several times by bees & know it doesn’t really hrt for more than a couple of minutes. I’m still a wuss about them though.
If it’s any consolation, stinging insects such as wasps and yellowjackets are not as aggressive in the spring as they are at the end of summer, when they are industriously gathering food and preparing for the long winter. So you’re less likely to get stung by one that blunders into your bedroom at this time.
The advice to keep a light on is a good one. Most all flying insects gravitate to light eventually, which is why dead flies and bees are always cluttering up windowsills.
The bright light idea is a good one. try hanging a strip of fly paper near it, if you can find any. This is the long sticky strip you unroll from a roll about the size of 35 millimeter film. You may trap your pest without having to spray noxious chemicals inside the room. Be careful around curtains, drapes, and such, as it can stick to them and maybe make a mess.
OK, Icky Alert: Do not read further if wasps and stuff make you squeamish.
We had a wasp nest under the eaves of our house when I was a boy. I used to climb a tree near it to watch them from close-up, say, 8-10 feet away. One of them stung me - right on the eyelid. The lid swelled up so much I couldn’t see with that eye. It turned several shades of dark purple, andit was 4-5 days before the swelling went down enough that I could see again. I still watch the wasps sometimes, but from a little farther away and from where I can run if I need to.
