Mud daubers.

When we first moved into our current house, I was horrified to find a wasp nest stuck to the wall above the back door. We sprayed it with poison and knocked it down. Later I was dismayed to learn what makes this type of nest.

You see, this is the nest of the most magical and wonderful member of the order Hymenoptera, the mud dauber.

This noble beast is truly the greatest of all wasps. What makes the mud dauber so beautiful and special? It eats spiders. Especially black widows. Mud daubers are also solitary, so one wasp doesn't mean there are dozens more somewhere plotting your demise., and they aren't territorial either. Our mud dauber can be spotted hanging around the pond in the turtle pen, her nest is once again above our back door, but we've never actually seen her up there. It has at least six cells now, each filled with an assortment of horrible arachnids that will never bother anyone ever again. Thank you mud dauber!

Bee Hives versus Wasp Hives

I have a big problem with the general public's perception of bee hives, and Winnie the Pooh is actively promoting this misinformation. Thanks to cartoons and whimsical garden sculptures, most people people see this:

...and think it is inhabited by these:

When actually most honey bees build their homes in existing holes, like in hollow trees or in the ground, or that whole in the wall of your shed. A classic oval-shaped hive with rings is much more likely to be home to these little bastards:

Seriously, fuck wasps. Those fucking beasts don't die when they sting you, and they will sting you. Not because you got too close to their nest, not because they got scared while you were close by, just because you were there and they were in the mood.

My anti-wasp prejudice and proper wasp hive recognition abilities don't really go over well with most of my family, especially on the Winnie the Pooh ride at Disneyland...

We moved.

We moved into a new house that is down the street from Z's work. Now he doesn't have to commute an hour each way. We split with the roommates and rented a very old little house. We had a rough time finding a place around here that would rent to people with pets, so we signed paperwork and agreed to rent the place after just a brief walk-through. We didn't get to see the place again until moving day, when we discovered it was already inhabited by roaches. Also some wasps were building a nest over the back door. We immediately got to work fixing the problems.

The wasps were easy to get rid of, and the roaches were surprisingly quick to leave too. We put out a whole bunch of poison baits for them, cleaned like crazy, and kept everything in the refrigerator. Within a week of moving in we stopped seeing them at all. It's been almost two months and we have yet to see a single roach. That doesn't stop me from sneaking into the kitchen late at night and flipping on the lights really fast to see if I can catch them in the act.