April 13th, 2018

This is right outside our backdoor.  Delightful (not!)  Wasps.

​Over and over again, Tim's risks their ire by knocking it down.  They return and build it back up. I spray Wasp repellent like a maniac and probably shorten my own life exposing myself to terribly toxic chemicals.  Doesn't seem to bother them one bit.  I think they bathe in the stuff daily. The probably have wasp spray cocktails before dinner every night. 

​It was suggested to me by a friend to spray them with the old Listerine. That nasty smelling and even worse tasting brown stuff that could remove at least one or two layers of skin from the inside of your mouth.  I think they gargled with the stuff.  They probably had very good breath but otherwise, it didn't impact them at all.

​Mothballs was another suggestion.  I can only say that the wasps families winter clothes will not be bothered by moths.  However, they were unaffected in any other fashion.

​The only thing we have heard of that we have not yet tried is the blue paint trick.  Have you heard of this one?  Apparently wasps either intensely dislike the colour blue or perhaps they are tricked into thinking anything painted blue is the sky because we are told that wasps will not build nests on anything painted blue.  Not just any blue mind you, but the clear light blue of a cloudless summers day. In the south at least, there are many a porch ceiling painted this particular shade of blue. Hmmmm.

​Before I invest the money and the energy into this idea, I will need to do a little more research on it's effectiveness.  We are talking here about the underside of the roof overhang. Oh, and some of it is wood, some of it is  metal.  I know that there is paint that works on  metal.  For some reason, I seem to think it is spray paint.  I wonder if they have spray paint in light blue? And would the same paint work on wood as metal or would that require two different types of paint?  What a PIA.

​I have to give the wasps points though, they are persistent.  I think if someone kept destroying my home over and over and over again, I would eventually give up. But nope, they return every time.  And not just return and rebuild either. They come back and rebuild in the EXACT same spot every single time.  There must be something superspecial about that spot.

​When I first moved to Texas, which is a tornado heavy state, I remember reading in the newspaper about a rebuilding fund for a town that was devastated by a tornado.  Of course I felt dreadful for those folks who lived there and I mentioned it to one of my new Texas friends who then informed me that that particular town got hit hard by tornados every single year.   It seemed obvious to me that the town had been built in some sort of natural tornado path and wondered why they didn't just rebuild it a little to the right or the left of that path the next time?  I still wonder about that.  I'm sure there is a reason. Just one that I do not know.  Maybe that town  was originally built in the most beautiful and amazing spot in all of the enormous state of Texas. A spot that is just too good to walk away from.

​And it's probably the same sort of thing with this wasp nest.  That spot under the overhang right outside our backdoor must be the wasp sweetspot.  Maybe for them it's like having an ocean front home or one of those houses that appears to be teetering on the edge of a cliff.  The owners know that there could be a hurricane or a mudslide that might destroy the building, but they build it there anyway because the view is just so spectacular that it's worth the risk.

​I suppose all of life is a risk and it is absolutely worth taking.  I don't know about the view all of the time, but life itself?  Beautiful.