Thursday, August 18, 2011

Bugz

Well, it's been an interesting couple of weeks here.  I discovered carpenter ants in my garage roof.  I walked in to put some recycling away and saw two mini piles of fine sawdust on the floor.  Damn!, carpenter ants! I knew immediately what it was, as our family cabin had had them at one time.  I was slightly freaking out.  I sprayed raid and tried to find where they were getting in.  I ended up making an appointment with a pest control company to come and spray.  They ended up finding two areas they were nesting.  Thankfully they are now history.  In the mean time I discovered a hornets nest in a tree in my back yard.  Unfortunately I had discovered it after I had been stung while mowing the lawn.  The sting proceeded to get larger and larger and more and more swollen until I had to make my way to the doctor.  I'm now on penicillin and it's much better.

So, weird thing is I was going to deal with the nest in the next few days and get it down (it was only 4 - 5 feet off the ground, so very accessible) but last night when I went to check on it it was smashed to the ground.  I had thought my friend had knocked it down for me but on further investigation I found out he didn't touch it.  It was now a mystery and the only thing I could think of is a predator ripped it down to eat the larva.  I looked online to see what could possibly be a predator of hornets and to my amazement Skunks, raccoons and black birds where listed, among others.  I've definitely had those critters in my back yard at one time or another. Wow, you learn something new every day.
I just wanna say thank you to whatever animal did that...and I hope you didn't get stung in the process!