A "Buzz" In The Night

This is in no way as good as it sounds... It is however, now it's a past event, bloody funny, well the imagery of it makes me laugh!

I work in a pub once or twice a week, and when I work a Friday or Saturday night I don't tend to get home before around two in the morning, later if we stop for pizza afterwards. On the particular Saturday night in question I got home around half two with every intention of doing my usual "stay up until 5am drinking wine, watching movies and have a long lie in the next morning". Well for whatever reason, it had been a long shift, around half three I decided I had had enough of yawning and for once headed to bed before my husband who elected to stay up to read to the end of the chapter in the book he's reading.

So I head into our room and get myself settled in to bed as normal, but figured as he wasn't going to be long I'd read a book on my iPhone and wait for him. Five or ten minutes pass peacefully and I suddenly hear this buzzing sound to my left, right by the bedside lamp. I turn my head very slowly and see this wasp hovering over my bedside table. Now, simply put, I hate wasps!!! I remember when I was about thirteen or so and at boarding school, there was a wasp nest outside my dorm window and they crawled in and under my duvet cover and I got stung about twelve times in one night and ended up sleeping on a chair...

So suffice to say the teeny, tiny, buzzy insect scared the ever living hell out of me prompting me to sit bolt upright before tearing off the covers and sprinting to the door. The only thing missing was the screaming and waving hands over my head... Think this sort of thing...




Having reached the door I switched the main lights on to see exactly where the little flying piece of evil had gone and it proceeded to shove off up to the lights and buzz round them. At some point during my panicked flight from the other side of the room I had grabbed a dvd and was now brandishing it "very" ominously at the wasp. What the hell I thought I was going to do with that I have no idea because my bedside table is covered in perfume bottles and therefore not exactly "swat friendly" and now it was up by the ceiling there was no improvement as I now couldn't reach it.

Whilst standing there debating my options I suddenly saw another of them fly up to the lights. Oh great, now there are two death delivering winged devils in my room!

It was around this time that my husband decided to come to bed and upon walking into the hallway was accosted by the sound of his rather scared wife calling his name. He walked in to find out what was going on and I just pointed and muttered "wasp", because obviously speaking loudly would've gotten their attention... *eye roll*
While we watched through another flew in through the curtain, and then another! We both seemingly came to the same conclusion that we no longer wanted to inhabit the same space as them and shot out the bedroom door closing it behind us.

This led us to standing in the living room debating what on earth we were planning on doing, which then in turn led to the realisation that due to me having been in bed my clothing situation was somewhat less than ideal, which led to my husband handing me his coat, which comes to the waist... Thanks soooooo much hunny...!
I grabbed a throw off the sofa and wrapped that round me but I still think I would've been considerably happier in something more substantial, you know like a beekeepers suit or something like that! During my haphazard assembly of some vaguely useful clothing ideas (oh and it should be noted there was a ton of fresh laundry hanging in our hallway but my adrenalin soaked brain seemed to bypass this information) my husband had gone outside to see if he could see anything and come back to inform me that not only were all our bedroom windows wide open but also there was a lovely big flowering bush under them. Deep joy and rapture. He proceeded to push the windows closed with an umbrella which removed any danger of any further invasion but still left us with a decision to make about the ones already inside, which we decided to check on, and walked in to find there was now somewhere in the region of ten of them all flying around our lights.

So the options were simple.

1. Sleep in the bedroom regardless and hope we don't get stung - Oh hellzzzz no!
2. Spend the next however long trying to kill them all before going to bed - It was already around half five in the morning by this point and I had work at midday so that seemed a little time devouring
3. Sleep in the living room and leave the lights on in the bedroom so we know where they are - SOLD!

Plan decided upon, we still had a few more details to sort out. Namely we needed to switch off the bedside lamp, I needed my phone and I also needed a pair of jeans for work the next day. So Operation Wasp Dodge was born. *fanfare*

The idea was simple. We would both go into the bedroom with seperate objectives and that way we could halve the amount of trips into Sting Central would be required. I had managed to kill one on a previous scouting expedition but it was in the centre of the bed making it a little hard to get across without getting stung. Still we decided I would go for the light as I knew where the (hopefully) dead wasp was and my husband would get my phone. Then we would reconvene and choose new targets.

Opening the door I led the way into enemy territory and very slowly and quietly inched my way to and then across the bed to the lamp. Switching it off I then shuffled backwards to the door and scarpered, followed swiftly by the husband with my phone.

As the only other absolute necessity was my jeans I said I would go back in for them, and ventured back inside once more. I would love to have been able to see this from above, me crawling carefully across the floor like one of those soldier toys only to grab a pair of jeans and do the crawl/scramble/backup version of a panicked flee from the room.

As it turns out leaving the light on was a good call as they all fried themselves overnight pretty much and we've since found the nest and had it taken care of, but I love that we can turn a wasp invasion into all out war with something a minute fraction of our size...