On Tuesday last week I went into my bedroom for my book. I noticed several dark things on the carpet by the window and went for a closer look...wasps! Mostly dead wasps. About 10 of them. Two more were on the curtains slowly moving about. I grabbed my shoe off and smacked the living ones and then grabbed my long handled tongs and picked up all the bodies and flushed them.
How the hell did they get into my bedroom? Why had so many had died and why were the living ones so stunned. I wrote their condition down to heat prostration, but how did they get in? The window wasn’t open. In fact the winter’s plastic was still on it, since that window is never opened because it’s too hard to close.
Later that day...more dead and dizzy wasps. I killed the live ones and flushed all the bodies. I grabbed some pj’s, clean clothes and my pillow and blanket, then closed the door and shoved a towel in the space at the bottom. I spent the night on my couch.
The next morning...more wasps!! I killed the live ones and disposed of the evidence. A decided to go talk to a friend who figured she might be able to hear them if they were inside the walls. She listened on the bedroom walls...and could hear something faint where the hot water tank was at the end of the closet. I stepped onto the back porch and tried to figure out if there was an outside access to the hot water tank...and saw two wasps climb up the top of the metal siding of the trailer and go underneath the top board and disappear. At the same time my friend yelled. She saw a wasp come out of a hole in my closet wall. The water heater takes up a 3 foot X 3 foot space at the end of my closet and there is a false wall there blocking it off from the rest of the closet. The wasps were coming in through the outside wall, into the space for the water heater and then into my bedroom via a hole in the top of the false wall in my closet. Great!! And I discovered by watching while I hung a wasp catcher up outside, that they were bringing worker wasps into my house, carrying them in their mandibles!
The bloody insects were moving in uninvited and building a damned nest around my water tank!!!
I borrowed a foamy from a friend and spent night on the floor in my living room. I got in touch with a couple of pest control companies who couldn’t do anything until the next week. I fixed the bed up in the spare bedroom and waited the weekend out. Come Monday, one of the pest companies phoned and came over. We inspected the outside wall...no wasps... and he began to talk like I was just a ditzy female freaking over nothing. We went into the main bedroom and he saw about 20 dead wasps on the floor...not a nothingburger!! So he got busy and with much manoeuvering managed to get the false wall off and told me...no nest.
BUT...rat poop. Yeah. Evidence of a rat in the space. He managed to get the fake wall out of the closet and showed me the poop...and the hole in the floor it was getting in through. Shit!
When I bought my trailer I had a plumber replace the old hot water tank. He never mentioned the hole in the floor or offered to put a piece of plywood down to cover the hole. He just replaced the tank. Asshole!! The new tank is in front of where the hole is, so there is now no access to the hole. It’s on the far side of the tank in a very small space. Sure, I can buy steel wool and try to use a long handled pickup tool to cram the wool into the hole, but a rat could easily just push the wool out of the hole. I just don’t know how I’m going to fix this. It’s going to be like doing repairs outside the space station, but it has to be fixed!
Update from last night when I wrote this diary:
I suited up with mask and rubber gloves and vacuumed all the dead wasps and went to vacuum the rat poop...and there are live wasps hanging out on the hot water tank...along with more old rat poop. I had got steel wool and a fine metal mesh and was going to try and place the mesh on the hole then put a loaf pan on top of the mesh and put rocks in the pan so the weight would keep out intruders but the access to the hole is only 3-4”wide! I’ll try to deal with it tonight when the wasps are asleep. Ugg!!
So...that’s my frelling problem...what’s yours?