I read a story at Lucky Girl blog today. She discovered a wasp making a nest behind her car’s gas tank door. She didn’t have anything handy besides the gas in the gas nozzle. She did manage to kill the wasp, but she used some (precious) gas. And God forbid the wasp or pieces of the nest should ever spill into the fuel tank! You’d clog up your fuel line! It got me thinking about killing wasps in an emergency like that.
We have a TON of wasps around here. 
I wrote a post about The Mother of all Wasp Nests a few months ago. The nests can get bigger then a basketball, and there can be millions of wasps buzzing around. Because the back side of our house gets so blazing hot, and because the eaves of our house are so long and pitched, the wasps LOVE it around here. I could estimate that we have about two dozen small (but growing) wasp nests on the house right now. For outdoors, I have to use the toxic spray to kill them. I don’t like killing the wasps, because they are actually very beneficial to the garden. Wasps eat the nasty caterpillars and larvae that chew up the green plants I’m trying to grow. However some people are horribly allergic to stinging insects and have to wear medical id tags in case of being stung! I’m not about to take any chances with the pests around the home. Even though you leave wasps alone, they will leave you alone (for the most part), I do not like them around the house, so we spray the ones outside.
But the wasps also find a way of getting inside the house. Whether through an open door, or through the multitudes of openings my rickety old house has to the outdoors, they get in. We have a few nests INSIDE the house, between the exterior siding and the interior plaster walls (in the studs). They manage to get in the house, especially on chilly days.
What to do when you’ve got wasps inside the house? I have a can of hairspray for such an event. The hairspray hardens their wings and renders them useless. Be sure to use the super-duper kind of hairspray, otherwise the stuff won’t harden fast enough and you’re going to be doing battle with an angry wasp.
1. May 2008 at 6:51 pm
Yesterday I read that article about the wasp inside the car’s gas tank door. This is so weird because about 2 weeks ago one of our local radio dj’s had the same thing happen to her. She talked about it n the radio and thought it was so odd to find a wasp inside that door. I think it is odd too and wonder how in the heck the wasp got there???Hairspray on wasps….never thought about it but that sounds great. I have some heavy duty stuff I spray on my hair and I’ll certainly use it. Thanks!!