What happens if you’re too soft-hearted

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As you probably noticed by now, I’m interested in wildlife of all sorts and generally believe in letting things be, as much as possible. Well, I’m currently in the process of renovating an old house, which has been taking a long time and a lot of work, and now it was mostly done and looking rather good. But after not being able to get there for over a week, I arrived one day to find dozens of wasps crowding around the upstairs window and crawling all over the floor. I couldn’t think where they had come from, but they didn’t seem to be doing harm so I carefully opened the window and helped them out. Then Little One (who’s very observant) noticed a wasp squeezing out of a tiny hole in the ceiling. We waited and watched, and it struggled out, and then after a short pause was followed by another… and another… they just kept on emerging. By the end of the afternoon I reckon we had assisted around 300 of them outside. I didn’t know much about wasps, so I wasn’t sure whether this was a problem or not. Obviously there was a nest in the tiny space in the apex of the roof. But I knew nests didn’t last from one year to the next, so I thought perhaps once all the ‘baby’ wasps had flown the nest, as it were, that might be the end of that. But the next day the hole was noticeably bigger, and as we stood below we could actually hear the wasps chewing through the plasterboard. Still I hoped for the best. But I was away again for a few more days and when I got back the place was full of wasps again and the ceiling looked like this! Obviously the problem wasn’t going to go away. In fact the wasps were chewing away the plasterboard and expanding the nest inside the room. I was forced to call in the pest control man who clearly thought I was mad. ‘What were you thinking?!’ he exclaimed as he donned his protective gear. He claimed he’d never seen anything like it in 20 years, and had to make two visits. Then of course I had to have the ceiling re-boarded, re-plastered and re-painted. I guess I learned an expensive lesson there. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.