Battle of the Gable

This year I have noticed more wasps than normal around the property. My wife caught sight of a wasp crawling into the tailgate of the Ford Ranger. She told me about it and I went and investigated. Nothing. false alarm.

A week or two passed, and I noticed more wasps. This time in the backyard, and in the front yard too. Sheesh. Where are these little guys coming from?
I love bees. Love those little fat honey bees, even those squaty bumblebees. You don’t mess with them and they are happy to go about their work gathering nectar or whatever they get.

Wasps… are not nearly as cuddly or even happy to be just hanging around. They are a little territorial. Maybe because they put the terror in territory.

My wife, Hp (short for Honeypie), was sweeping the front porch when she bumped one of the pillars with the broom. Apparently, those little guys had set up camp somewhere inside the gable over the porch.

These weren’t the big paper wasps I was used to seeing. They were smaller, maybe half an inch long, and fast. Really fast. They buzzed around almost like flies, zipping from one place to another. The porch was suddenly full of them.

A moment later, a scream. Hp came through the door and started stripping off her shirt. “Hornets! I got stung!”

Now, HP is allergic to honeybees, so I tend to react a little sharply when something with wings and a stinger decides to attack her.

These things were definitely in attack mode. Fast-attack monsters, but apparently nobody had explained to them that they were small. What they lacked in size, they made up for in numbers.

She already had a huge welt, almost a hive, forming on her shoulder and another one on her arm. It had happened that fast. One bump of the broom against the pillar, and apparently Hp had declared war on an enemy we hadn’t even known was there.

The Battle of the Gable had begun.

I gathered my gear: a can of twenty-foot foaming wasp spray, a ladder. I just needed to wait for the right time for my counter attack.

Meanwhile, Hp was taking Benadryl and using calamine lotion to keep the itching under control. The welt on her shoulder eventually swelled to about the size of a computer mouse, red, angry, and hard to ignore.

After a week, the swelling finally went down, leaving behind what looked more like a bruise, red and black. By the following weekend, I was ready. There is something primal about defending your territory. Your home and family.

I realize the wasps were only doing their part, same as me. As far as they were concerned, we were the problem. They had found themselves a nice, protected spot inside a gable, built a home, and then some giant woman came along and whacked their front door with a broom. From their perspective, the response was probably perfectly reasonable.

Unfortunately for them, I was prepared to defend mine, and I waited for the perfect time to attack.

The air was cool. It was about fifteen minutes before sunrise. Hopefully the little monsters would still be tucked inside, sleeping, sluggish, or whatever wasps do before sunrise. It seemed like the perfect ambush.

I hauled out the ladder and positioned it alongside the gable over the front porch. I climbed up until I was nearly eye level with the roofline.

There it was: a tiny hole. That was the only visible sign that an entire civilization of angry little wasps had apparently taken up residence inside my house. I raised my can of twenty-foot foaming wasp spray, aimed carefully, and fired. White foam went everywhere. Along the roofline, across the gutter, around the hole. Maybe even inside the hole. It looked like I emptied a fire extinguisher.

I waited.

Nothing. No buzzing or movement or tiny bodies dropping from the sky.

I must have missed. Missed? That couldn’t be right. I was practically on top of the thing. So, in what would soon prove to be a questionable tactical decision, I took the can and knocked on the roof.

Bam. Bam. Bam. “Hello?”

From a safe distance, my wife said something along the lines of, “Don’t do that!” Or maybe, “Don’t be a dumb ass?” I can’t recall exactly.

That’s when I heard a disturbing sound. At first, it was faint. The sound of tiny feet and wings beating against wood. A low, growling buzz somewhere inside the gable. They had heard the knock. And they were looking for a way out so they could answer it.

I looked at the foamed-up entrance with a little surge of confidence. “Ha! Got you.”

In hindsight, I was smug as hell.

That angry little buzzing got louder. Much louder. That was when another possibility occurred to me. They might have more than one entrance, or exit. A moment later, I was armpit-deep in pissed-off little wasps. Did I mention I was standing on a ladder ten feet in the air? Retreat seemed like the best tactical option.

I came down that ladder much faster than I had gone up it. Actually, “came down” might be generous. Somewhere near the bottom, I abandoned the ladder entirely, jumped, hit the ground, and rolled.

A surprisingly graceful combat maneuver, really. Especially for a man being pursued by a cloud of angry wasps. I came up on my feet and kept moving. No broken bones. No twisted ankle. Nothing. Amazing, really.

I would like to say it was skill or finesse, but it was dumb luck. I should have broken my neck.

I could already see the newspaper headline: Man With Broken Neck Gets Stung to Death.

The wasps had won that round.

As I prepared for another attack on the little monsters, the rain came and the weather turned colder. I waited until the following weekend to launch my assault. Armed with a ladder and foaming spray, I tempted fate once again. That’s when I discovered something surprising.

The wasps were gone.

Not defeated or vanquished by my twenty-foot foaming spray. Not overcome by my superior tactics during the Battle of the Gable. They had simply moved on.

Apparently, when cold weather comes, the colony dies off and the queen finds someplace protected to wait out the winter. Under bark, in the ground, wherever a queen who has thoroughly humiliated a six-foot-two man with a ladder chooses to retire.

I had spent weeks planning attacks, spraying holes, climbing ladders, and trying to outsmart an insect with a brain roughly the size of a punctuation mark. In the end, she waited me out. The queen had survived the Battle of the Gable. I suppose I could claim victory. After all, the porch was mine again.

Somewhere out there, tucked safely away for the winter, I imagine a tiny queen telling the next generation about the morning some idiot climbed a ladder, knocked on her house, and yelled, “Hello?”

— Dennis D. Montoya
Stories Forged in Ink and Ash

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