Summer, the Wasp Edition

    At this very moment, my husband is standing at our French doors, gazing out at the balcony.  It is a beautiful sunny, summer day.  When I say ‘standing’, I of course mean cowering, and the doors are locked and barricaded.  He’s been there for three days.  He brushes me away with irritation when I inquire how the project is coming along.  He can’t hear me anyway.  The shopvac he’s put on the deck to vacuum up a wasp colony has been on for the last 36 hours and is making a noise like a Mac truck trying to get up a steep hill.  I shrug and tell him I am going down to the shops, and I make for the door with my little shopping bag. 

     “Don’t go out there!” he shrieks, lunging at the door I’ve just opened. But then he changes his mind and pushes me out, slamming the door behind me, his eyes wild, watching keenly to see what will happen to me.  Periodically he opens the door an inch, and using the long pole we have to reach a high skylight, stabs at the planter from the safety of the house.  More wasps fly out.  There appear to be an infinite number of wasps.

     How did we get here?  I blame Youtube.  Early in the summer, perhaps under the cover of darkness, some wasps moved into one of our bamboo planters, or maybe it was late spring; I don’t know when wasps move, or how they know where available vacancies are.  But suddenly there they were, having children, setting up schools and workshops, enjoying salmon dinners with us in our outdoor eating area, coming in to the kitchen to see what we’d left out for them, swarming out of their planter palace when I water the bamboo to enjoy a bath, stinging me when I let the water get too cold.  I stop watering that part of the garden, and my other half takes up the duty, scoffing at my cowardice.

    First we read up on how to co-exist.  We sit outside trying to get them used to us.  My husband is browsing the net in his singlet and a pair of shorts.  ‘Try not to smell like flowers’ he reads.

   “You’re alright then,” I say.

   There’s a little piece of wood over the corner of the planter that he must have left during one of his little-pieces-of-wood projects, and the wasps fly in and out from under it.  One day when I’m sweeping the deck, I accidently knock the piece of wood askew and the wasps swarm out in a panic.  By the time they notice me, I’ve jumped away to the other side of the deck and am pretending innocence, but some of them, I can see from their expressions, are not convinced.  I regret the rose scent I’ve sprayed on that morning.  The rest of them, though, swarm and buzz around that piece of wood all day long, trying to figure out how to move it back.  That’s when I realize they aren’t that bright. 

    We reach a crisis point when the nice fellows painting the building come and ask us to move all the planters away from the walls.  We know then. They will have to go.   My husband finds a Youtube video about how to get rid of them without using poison.  It involves filling a shop vac with water and soap, and vacuuming them up.  It only takes 4 hours, he says.  At first he contemplates the karma of this, and plots a catch and release scheme, where he vacuums them up into a pair of my pantyhose, and then carries them into the forest.

    “What if they home?” I ask.  It’s only one of the many possible questions I could ask about this scheme.

    “Good point.”

    I ask to see the video and you can see the householder actually vacuuming up his wasps, providing a running commentary, but I am surprised that my husband is not put off by the five times the householder says things like, “They’re really angry now” and “Oh boy, they are mad!” accompanied by the sound of him tripping over something trying to back away.  It turns out that wasps aren’t all that keen on being vacuumed into a canister of soapy water.  They look around to see whom they can blame.  It also turns out that it is easier to vacuum up a nest that is hanging on the eaves, than one constructed inside a 4 foot by 1 foot planter.  Still, after the initial 4 hours my husband kicks the planter and nothing flies out.

    “They’re gone!” he exclaims proudly, like a homesteader turning back a grizzly.  We look in the canister.  Hundreds of gratifyingly dead wasps.  “Take that!” he says to their little floating corpses.  He’s obviously not thinking about Karma anymore.   A few hours later he’s standing on the deck in the sun with a cup of coffee and gives the planter another victorious kick, and hundreds of angry wasps fly out. They make for him like he’s an ambient teriyaki grilled salmon.  And that’s why we’ve had the shop vac running for three days, and my husband has not been out of the house.  I come and go as I please, though.  They know it’s not me.