Holy crap! That is one large hornet nest.

[Filbert]

@mhendo

Wasp-related story:

When i was much younger, i worked for a couple of summers as a waiter and bartender in a nice country house hotel in the English Lakes District. It was a job where a lot of the staff lived on-site, and for a while i had a room in the hotel itself, rather than in the separate staff quarters. It wasn’t like a guest room; more like the rooms of the staff at Downton Abbey, on the top floor of the building, at the back.

One morning, i found a couple of European wasps in the room. I assumed they had gotten in through an open window, so i got rid of them and forgot about it. The next morning, there was another. And the morning after that, i woke just in time to see one of the little bastards sink its stinger into my bare chest.

After yelling in pain, crushing the attacker in my bare hand, and throwing it with all my strength against the wall, i set about making a closer inspection of the room. I noticed that the opening in the ceiling, leading to the attic, had its cover very slightly askew, leading to a small gap. I assumed that this is where the wasps had got in, so i adjusted it to close the gap.

But i also went to the head groundskeeper/maintenance guy to tell him that there might be a nest up there somewhere. He called in a pest control person, and they found a huge nest up in the roof. Until i raised the alarm, no-one had noticed it, because the wasps had been able to come and go under the eaves, without getting into the main part of the building. It was only the mis-aligned cover in my room that allowed them in, and gave the game away.

The exterminator took care of them in short order.

I also have an English Lake District wasp story featuring oblivious people: my parents own a kayak, which, living not all that far away, we would occasionally take for a paddle on one of the lakes in the aforementioned Lake District. So, one fine summer morning, me and Mum loaded it up on the car, got a picnic ready, and headed off to Coniston Water, to paddle out to one of the islands, eat our sandwiches and things, maybe have a swim, then paddle back.

We’d noticed a couple of wasps while on the water, and had commented on how we’d never noticed wasps that far from land before, but we didn’t really think about it. So we got back to where we’d parked the car (in the sneaky free parking spot), carried the kayak up from the water, and, just as we’re about to put it back on the roof rack Mum says “Oh, did you leave a plastic bag in there?” reaches into the kayak, and pulls out a large occupied wasp nest :eek:

I hope they had a nice day out; they didn’t sting us, they didn’t even pinch any of our lunch.

[mhendo]

@Darren_Garrison

Only if the queen gets away. They are eusocial.

From what the guy in the video was saying, it sounds like queens. Plural.

When he picked the camera up and took it over to the nest, he was saying, “There’s a bunch of queens.” And this article on the Southern Yellowjacket notes that colonies can have more than one queen, especially in temperate climates where the colony can survive the winter. which surely must have been the case with this colony. That nest and all of those wasps must surely have taken longer than a single summer to produce.