pests

The bees behind the cladding are no more.  The friendly pest controller came and sprayed poison into their nest with a long lance.  If there are still any signs of bee activity by Tuesday I am to give him a call, and he will come and give them another squirt.  Otherwise, as soon as there are no bees flying around the hole I must block it with expanding foam, or mastic, or something to make sure that no other bees can go in there and take poison back to their own nests.  He was quietly non-judgemental as to whether we should have left them to it, but I still felt that it wasn't viable to have the entrance to a colony no more than a couple of feet above head height on a corner of the building that sees regular foot traffic.  Applying the poison was a quick job, though I didn't hang around watching while he did it.

He was a friendly pest controller, the man who gave such a very good talk to the beekeepers a few months back.  If you are going to have somebody come to your house to deal with pests, and you know that you might have managed the situation better if you had thought about it properly, for example blocking up the hole in the cladding before bees or anything else could go in there, you want somebody humane, matter of fact, and cheerful, not an insecticide wielding equivalent of the sort of gloomy builder who demands to know who put that there, then?

I originally rang him about the bees, but then realised that since I was going to have an experienced professional pest controller on the premises, I could ask about the clothes moth as well.  That was a job for which I really did want somebody non-judgemental who had already testified in my presence to having seen pretty much everything in the world of pests.  Having the gap in the cladding was an embarrassing oversight, but as nothing compared to the sedimentary layers of old shoes in the bottom of the Systems Administrator's wardrobe.  The pest controller laughed a lot when I apologised for the contents of the wardrobe and explained that since I believed in the autonomy of the individual, I had not thought up to this point that I should interfere with the clothes of a grown-up man in his fifties, but had to become involved when the moths started invading my wardrobe as well.

The news on the moths is not good, or at least it is going to be an awful lot of trouble dealing with them.  The pest controller produced a torch, and showed me the little white specks on the bottom of the wardrobe that were the cast-off skins of moth larvae.  And on the edges of the carpet, and under the laundry basket.  He said they would be under the free-standing wardrobe as well.  What we have to do is take everything out of every cupboard, vacuum every crevice, empty and move the free-standing wardrobe and vacuum under that, and spray everything.  He gave me two aerosols of insecticidal spray, and for good measure a fumigant canister to use after we'd finished vacuuming and spraying.  It is going to take ages.  But ages.  Hours and hours.

The Systems Administrator received the news equably, and agreed to sort through the contents of the wardrobes.  It needed doing anyway.  I had already made the depressing discovery of a moth hole in the shoulder of the vintage Katherine Hamnett jacket, and a couple of smaller areas of minor damage.  Perhaps I can get it invisibly mended.  The V&A must see worse.

After the bees in cladding,and the moths, it came as a relief when I went to investigate the insects the SA worriedly told me were buzzing around one of the starling boxes, and saw they were bumble bees.  Too fat to be honey bees, and the bright ginger tummies gave them away.  The starling boxes have been stuck on the north end of the house for years, and never been used by a single starling, so I'm glad some wildlife has finally taken to them.  I told the SA not to worry about the bumble bees, they would only be using the box for the summer, and in any case would not hurt anybody.  I only hope they are not poisoned by fumes from the great clothes moth operation drifting out of the bedroom windows.