We've all heard of a wasp's nest. But a wasp's bed? Ridiculous.
One man living in England was startled to find that thousands of wasps had made themselves snug as a bug in a bed, literally. Upon opening a door in his mother's house that was rarely used, he was met with a bizarre sight. Wasps had built a nest over a bed in the room, covering about half of it. You can view a picture of the bed here.
"In 45 years I have never seen anything like it," an exterminator named John Birkett said. "There must have been 5,000 wasps. It was a job to deal with it."
The wasps' nest was 3 feet by 1-1/2 feet long in total. The wasps ate through part of the bed's mattress to make the nest. The nest had been growing for at least several months, Birkett estimated. A window in the bedroom had been open, and the room had been unoccupied for months. No one entered the room during that time, giving the wasps ample time to build the gargantuan nest.
Getting a call to exterminate a wasps' nest in a bedroom was unusual, Birkett said. However, he was unprepared for the sight that met him when he entered the bedroom. He said that the wasps were continuing to build the nest even as he stood there watching them.
"I got dressed up like a spaceman and tried to destroy as many as I could with the workers flying around the room," Birkett said. "In that nest there must have been up to 700 queen wasps."
Birkett said that the largest wasps' nest he had seen in a bedroom before this was about the size of a baseball or a tennis ball and called it the largest job of his career. The pest controller sprayed the area until it was safe from the wasps. By the time he had cleared the nest, he was even able to recover the blanket that was on top of the bed.
Birkett said that he was sad at having to kill so many wasps to get the job done. "It was a work of art and they had worked so hard, but she looked at it and said, 'No, no, no - you've got to get rid of it.' If they did that in three-and-a-half months, that's amazing, isn't it? They're just little things," Birkett said.
