Yellow Jackets Invade...

It's been quite a process and it all started with our dog, Bucky! Here is the story...

I was upstairs nursing Adah in her room but I had the gate closed at the top of the stairs so Bucky couldn't get up there. It seems like Adah is becoming more and more distracted while nursing so I try to keep the distractions out. I started to hear a noise in the stairway. Brian came up to talk to me and found that Bucky was chewing a hole right through the carpet in the corner of one of the steps. He chewed it right down to the wood in a matter of minutes. I figured he was just mad at me for locking him out of where I was at. It was definitely out of character for him to be like that but I didn't know why else he would do it. And then a few days later we found out. I was working in the kitchen and could hear a noise. As I started to follow it and look for it I realized it was coming from the wall right next to our stairway. And it was particularly loud right next to that hole that Bucky had chewed. Bingo. We thought we had it all figured out. We were thinking it must be a mouse and Bucky was trying to get at it. It sounded like it was chewing. Within a couple more days we started to realized we had a bee problem as well (all the while I am still hearing this noise in the wall). And we assumed that however the mouse got in, the bees must be getting in too. The bees weren't really that big of a problem at first. We just saw a few downstairs in Austin's room over the course of several days. Brian searched around the outside of the house and found an area where there were a lot of bees. He still couldn't find the hole in the house but we knew they had to be getting in somewhere behind our bushes so he bought a spray and drenched the area. He did that over the weekend and we thought the problem was solved.  And then Monday came and I had to call Brian and give him the bad news that the problem wasn't in fact fixed, but that it was worse. We knew we had a serious problem when in one day we had to kill several and found several more dead or almost dead-and they weren't just downstairs either. And then it hit me...the noise in the wall wasn't a mouse after all. It was a bunch of bees-yellow jackets to be exact. And here's a little yellow jacket info for you: They are one of two kinds of bees that are the most aggressive (and I will attest to that as I had a couple different occasions where I was sure it was out to get me and Austin made several comments that they chased him up the stairs from his room), they don't have stingers so they can sting you repeatedly and lastly we learned that they make their home in the floor joists and walls. YUCK! It was time to call an exterminator. We had a guy come out and he crawled behind our bushes and was able to find two holes that appeared to 'have a lot of traffic' he said. After spraying a powder/mist in there he said we shouldn't have any problems by the end of the week. The next day we found a couple more yellow jackets-one of which was upstairs in the office. This concerned me because we had never seen one upstairs before and the girls' rooms are up there. But it was the last one we ever saw. Now if we can just get those holes filled in, we can maybe avoid having anymore future problems.

Below you will find the video of me recording the sound coming from inside our wall.  WARNING: it is really gross and will make your skin crawl. Toward the end you can really hear them buzzing.  You will need to turn your volume way up to hear it though...just don't forget to turn it back down!