I phoned Neil, our oracle on almost everything.<\/p>\n ‘Kill them with fire!’<\/em>, he said, one of his stock answers to any question about problems with natures fauna. ‘Alternatively, wait until late evening or a cold morning, pick the nest up with a plastic bag, and then smash the hell out of it with a big rock, perhaps then burning it for good measure<\/em>‘.<\/p>\n I had visions of us setting Galicia alight and the last thing I really wanted to do was let pyromaniac Amanda loose with a pint of unleaded and a box of matches.<\/p>\n We looked for a local Rentokil operative but the nearest office was three hours away in Vigo. As it was Friday afternoon the local council was now deserted for the weekend so we had no option other than to take matters into our own hands, or in reality, for Amanda to ‘man-up’ and deal with the problem.<\/p>\n So this morning, after I’d suffered a sleepless, worry and wasp filled night, and while I cowered in the house on the verge of tears, Amanda tucked her trousers in her socks, pulled on a hat and thick gloves, put a scarf around her mouth and nose, and did the deed.<\/p>\n I almost applauded from the other side of the window as she battered a double-carrier-bagged Asian Hornets nest with the back of a shovel until there was no more movement, and their superbly engineered nest was as flat as a wasp filled pancake.<\/p>\n Since ‘the exterminator’ did her stuff we’ve had a couple of them come by to visit the site of their old nest but we suspect that the size of it meant that they’d just started building, and that Amanda’s swift actions will force them to find a new home, hopefully not on our finca.<\/p>\n Now, hopefully my blood pressure is now returning to normal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve always had terrible phobia of wasps and as with my only other weakness, ice cream, it is all the fault of my Mother. Some of my earliest memories are of my Mum shrieking and flapping her arms about like … Continue reading ![\"2017-04-29-PHOTO-00008212\"](\"http:\/\/www.visitgalicia.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/2017-04-29-PHOTO-00008212-300x293.jpg\")
<\/a>Amanda shouted back that it was about the size of a tennis ball (see the picture), quite small in the whole hierarchies of wasps nests. The ‘wasps’, it turns out through consultation with my ‘Insects of the British Isles and Western Europe’, were actually Asian Hornets, a particularly unpleasant multiple-stinging’ one inch long, armour plated ‘pain machine’. There were less than a dozen, but more than half a dozen. My blood pressure, it seemed, would remain high for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n