Let me make myself clear - I'm an animal lover and would not knowingly do harm to any living creature. I will go out of my way to help the smallest insect out of my house with a glass and some paper rather than squash the poor thing. I hoovered up an ant in the kitchen the other day by accident and was racked with guilt for hours. But I don't get on well with wasps. It not a fear and nor is it a grudge - I have never been stung by one, as far as I can remember. The only clear sting I do remember was from a bee.
It's a very vivid memory, as they always are. I would have been about five years old and standing in our garage. In those days my father never put the car away but left it on the drive. It was company owned so I suppose that meant he felt less pride through lack of true ownership. The garage was therefore a place of storage. It was a sunny day and my father was searching the bench which ran along the back wall for something or other and I was stood in the centre on the garage looking out past the car at the street beyond. My attention was attracted by a small black dot ziggerty-zagging around and had barely registered it as a bee when it flew straight into the garage, landed on my arm an stung me. Now I swear that this was totally unprovoked. The memory ends there but would no doubt have resulted in tears, quickly followed by a smothering in TCP or Savlon.
So apart from that one bee-astard I get on fairly well with bees. Wasps - well it hard to find anyone who likes a wasp. There have been various run-ins (or rather run-aways) with them over the years. But the biggest event was a few years ago when one summer we started finding them in our house more and more. Now, as I said, this was summer and a wasp loves an open window but statistically there was just too many of them bimbling around the place. In particular they were appearing in the upstairs bathroom which seemed to have grown a new one every morning!
Wondering if they were finding some way in I searched the room and slowly became away of a distant buzzing coming from above my head. The hatch to our attic was in the bathroom so climbing a ladder I pushed the hatch open and was immediately face to face with a wasp. Expecting the worst I waited until after dark (wasps do sleep I guessed) and I entered the attic. Sure enough there I found a wasps' nest in the eves of the roof. Now a wasps' nest can be a beautiful thing - I've seen several large globes of wood-pulp and wasp-spit in museums and indeed an old one in my sisters attic - but this was just shoddy. The wasps had basically rammed their splinter-sputum into a gag between two beams with no feeling of ownership (maybe it too was company owned). It was in fact the DIY Disaster of the insect world.
On returning to the world below, and checking I hadn't brought anything else back with me, I proceeded to contact the local council expecting them to be round in seconds with smoke grenades and a SWAT team ( in this case a team a people each with a swatter). But instead It was explained to me that wasps are no longer destroyed out of turn.
"What? Do they get a fair trial first?"
It transpires that wasps are in fact our friends (who knew?) Or at least the friend to the gardener as they will keep down the numbers of green-fly and other such pests. It was also explained that this would only be for the duration of the summer. When wasps reach that drunken, lairy stage of staggering around and slowly dying like a bad Shakespearian actor, the queen will go into hibernation deep within the nest. She will then re-emerge the next spring and head for a new location, there to start another home.
This of course was cold comfort to us who had to suffer a summer with a wasp in the bathroom each morning and particularly for myself being the only one who was ever sent up the attic to retrieve anything. Any such trip resulted in the need to cover myself head to toe in thick clothing and arm myself to the teeth. I'd then spend however long I was up there swatting away like Luke Skywalker with the practice drone in Star Wars, until I'd found whatever it was. Autumn duly arrived and the attic stopped buzzing. The next spring we think we witnessed the queen's abdication when a wasp the size of a gerbil appeared in my sons bedroom one morning. My trusty glass and paper saw her on her merry way and indeed the nest remained empty (not surprising given the look of the thing!)
We have since left the house in question and are presently hibernating ourselves at a temporary address before completing a move to our own new home. But, despite what we think of them, it looks like the wasps like us. The signs are appearing once more or rather the wasps are, all around the house. With any luck we'll have moved before they become too much of a nuisance again. But just in case I've been looking at old episodes of 'Grand Designs' in the evenings hoping the that the wasps are also watching and will try much harder this time - something with a mezzanine floor and open fireplace at least!...
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