A few years ago we would regularly have a couple of hundred hornets flying round the house in the evenings, battering against the windows and often found several sleepy ones on the floor of the living room in the morning. I decided to find out where they were coming from and tracked them to a small hole in some perforated zinc sheet that covers a loophole high in the gable end of our house. Perhaps I should explain that we live in a former Victorian primary school, so the architecture is quirky. Got a long ladder and could see through the zinc a smallish nest inside. Now, our living room is the old schoolroom so has 16 foot high ceilings and several trapdoors designed to be operated with a pull cord to ventilate the room, although the cords have been removed. So I takes the ladder indoors, climbs up and lifts the hatch, which is hinged. Sure enough, I could see the nest and got ready my can of wasp spray when I heard a low humming above me. Looking up my horrified gaze fell on a hornets nest of biblical proportions! When I measured it later it was 1.5 metres deep and over half a metre wide, filled with thousands of fairly angry hornets. I also found that when I lifted the hatch on its hinges it missed the bottom of the nest by barely a couple of cm.
Beat a hasty retreat and sat down to think of how to shift this and came to the conclusion that the only option was to zap it comprehensively. At the time my kids were very young and as we kept finding sleepy hornets on the floor in the morning they had to go, otherwise I might have left them. I dealt with the nest using Actellic powder, which is a farming insecticide I got from my brother in law.
Last year I disturbed a hornets nest in our compost heap and was comprehensively and persistently attacked by them despite legging it pronto, got stung about 10 times but it is less painful than a wasp sting, even though they are much bigger insects.
@ whoever said "snail" btw.... )
