Creative wasp management

Twice now the cat has alerted us to a wasp in the house. Fortunately for the cat, organ pipe mud daubers are pretty mellow wasps. Still, we didn't want them in the house.

The first one ended up in the bathroom, on the shower wall. Carl popped a plastic cup over it, slipped a piece of paper (a neighborhood newsletter, as it happened) under it, and then after a bit of "now what?" we masking-taped the cup to the paper. That was a couple of weeks ago.

The second one, yesterday, insisted on crawling around on our (sadly) popcorned ceiling. And mud daubers are good at squeezing into small spaces, so the cup idea didn't seem like such a good one. So we opened the front door, and when he tried to fly through the all-glass storm door, we slammed the front door on him. No problem, we'll just go around the back when we're ready to leave, open the storm if he hasn't found his way around it, and we're good.

Except I'm an idiot, and before we left I decided to put out the 2-liter I'd fashioned into a wasp trap. And I opened the front door, put it on the porch, started back in the house, and had a "Waaaaait a minute" moment.

This is how they end up in the house, after all: they go crawling around looking for a likely nesting spot, and come in where the weatherstripping is gone from the storm door. Then we open the front door, and presto, one confused wasp in the house.

This time, because it was getting dark, he decided to go back to the popcorned ceiling and go to sleep. Turning on the porch light couldn't entice him out there. Turning on the living-room lights just enticed him to dizzily bump the living-room lights, then go back to the ceiling as soon as we turned them off.

Finally, we got creative again. Shopvac, with the crevice tool from the house vac. Shhhhloomp! And then, um, duct-taped over the end of the crevice tool, because even a mellow wasp is going to be a little unhappy about that treatment. Shopvac went back outside, crevice tool came off, and if the wasp survived all that, hopefully it decided this is not a good place to nest.

And if not, then we'll have to get really creative.