The Female of the Species is More Deadly than the Male

I'm not a big bug fan... insects, arachnids, whatever. Not my cup of tea. If you want to see me jump into helpless-female-stereotype behavior, just watch me send my husband off spider hunting as I huddle on the sofa, eagerly awaiting news of its demise.

Above all I hate - not just dislike, HATE - wasps.

So there's a busy yellowjacket nest hanging in the eave above my bedroom window. Mr. Geeky McEngineer destroyed the nest the last nasty little monsters built outside the kids' bedroom window. With that threat abolished, we got a little lax about the new nest.

They may not know it yet (but I wouldn't put it past them to have read my mind and formed a plan to gird their skinny waspy abdomens for battle), but their lives end tonight. Why, you might wonder (or not) am I suddenly all motivated? Why is this nest MINE?

Because apparently there is a hole in the screen of my bedroom window. I wouldn't have noticed it, but when I was putting laundry away, this morning, a waspy intruder was busy exploring my baby's basinette, leaving who-knows-what kind of nasty pheremone trail in her wake.

Game on.

Note to all bugs in or around my house: you may think I'm a wimpy pushover, but that's only because you haven't crossed the line yet. You know you have not crossed it because you and your little buggy family still live. As long as you keep yourself out of the way when Mr. G and his shoe-of-death are on call, you're golden. But the second you set one sticky, buggy little appendage on my kids' sleeping surface, your life is forfeit. You meet the Ms. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. I promise the introduction will be brief but thorough.

Don't believe me? Ask the dismembered, smushed up wasp now residing in my HEPA filtered vacuum bag.

Or, if that doesn't convince you, witness the annihalation of a whole wasp colony and the nest of corpses it leaves behind.

And stay off the basinette. Got it?

(Edited to add: Title references poem by Rudyard Kipling.)