A week or so ago we noticed a lot of yellow jackets flying around outside our front kitchen window. Vader investigated and saw that they were all going down underneath the siding at the house's floor level. He sprayed and sprayed and then I started finding them IN the kitchen. I went downstairs to the basement. The basement is in two sections--one is our finished office and kids' playroom directly below the kitchen. The other is the "basement-basement" that is unfinished. I went to the office and in the area that the we thought the yellow jackets were in I saw a tiny hole in the ceiling. I showed Vader who told me that it had always been there. I never look up. Anyway, it had always been there but it looked a little tampered with. So he went to the adjacent basement and was able to look in between the beams of the house, between the ceiling of the office and the floor of the kitchen. And way down at the front of the house he saw mud and yellow jackets. Knowing there was no way he could get down there to really spray he accepted the fact that we had to call an exterminator.
On Tuesday we had an exterminator come out who guessed it was a pretty large nest and set up an appt. for Friday. They were supposed to come between 1 & 4 on Friday and they would have to cut out the sheet rock in the office ceiling in order to get the nest and remove it.
Yesterday morning while at Chewie's checkup, just as she was about to get her shots, my cell rings. Vader tells me that the yellow jackets broke through the sheet rock in the ceiling and had now infiltrated the office in large numbers instead of the few that had managed to find their way through the vent to get to the kitchen over the last week. He was going to go to home depot and didn't want us to go to the office. We got home around 12 and Vader was on his way home from the depot. I was just getting everybody settled in the house and was going to make a quick lunch when the exterminators showed up early. I went out to meet them and explained the different situation now. They came inside and I showed them the office door. One of them opened it and there was a yellow jacket right there. He told me to go in the kitchen with the kids and he went down to see. He didn't get far when he came back up and said there were LOTS of them. We had to leave the house for 2-4 hours. So as soon as Vader got back the kids and I left, again, and he went out on the deck with the dogs.
We went to Burger King and planned to eat at the park when I realized I left my cell phone at home in the rush to get out. Joy. I wanted to be near a phone. So we decided to go to my MIL's house because she was in North Carolina. My new key for her house didn't work. We ate BK on her front steps while I nursed Chewie who was irritated at the shots and life in general. The Princess tells me she has to pee. I get out the travel potty that I luckily had in the car and she sat on it and proceeded to do a huge dump. I'm sure the neighbor's were watching through their windows--I would have been--but I didn't care at that point. My MIL's outside garbage now has burger king bags and a bag of pee and poop. I took the kids to the library and had an awful feeling of deja vu--being stuck there and counting the minutes until 5 pm. ;-)
The Princess asked to go home, everyone was cranky, aside for the brief 30 mins we were home we had been gone since 8:30 am. I called for a pizza and we went to pick it up. The Princess fell asleep in the car. Chewie was sleeping/crying. I considered leaving them in the car while I went inside to get the pizza but SkyWalker refused and said someone would take them all. Not bloody likely with the way they were behaving that day! So I picked up the sleeping Princess and Chewie in the carrier and SkyWalker held the door open for me and we went and got our pizza and the guy brought it out to the car without being asked. We got home shortly after 5 and ate on the deck since the guys said we shouldn't go inside until 7. They had to spray so much.
It took them 4 or 5 times to spray before they could even get close to where the nest was in the office ceiling. The nest didn't fall through, the yellow jackets themselves just ate a hole or whatever through the damn sheet rock. They cut out a huge section of the sheet rock because the nest was HUGE. They showed Vader the larva in the nest and we would have had even more! There were at least 1000 yellow jackets there. Vader spent last night with the shop vac and the steam mop vacuuming up the dead yellow jackets. We now have to clean all the kids toys and anything we can. He took pictures but I can only upload them on the desktop in the office and I'm not going there until the smell is completely gone.
We were very lucky that A) Vader was home and not in Rochester. B) We were home and not on LI like we will be next week and were just 2 weeks ago. C) Even though the exterminators were scheduled at 1 Vader left work at 10 and was home to wait for them--instead of us getting home from the doc at noon and SkyWalker and the Princess going to the office like they normally do. So many things could have been so much worse. None of us, dogs included, got stung at all. It was a long irritating day but much better than being in the ER because the kids had gotten swarmed.
Pictures will follow as soon as I can.
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