Wasp close up by haquintero

Wasps chew mattress to create 3ft nest in Winchester spare bedroom

Here’s an “Argh!” story from BBC Hampshire.

A woman has found a three foot (yes, three foot!) wasp nest on the bed in her spare room in St Cross, Winchester.

It contained 5,000 wasps and was described as “extremely dangerous” if a non-specialist had tried to tackle it.

Biggest job of career
During its removal, the pest-specialist – who described it as “the biggest job of his career” – said the nest split in two.

Luckily he shut the door to the spare room after he entered, “otherwise the house would have been filled”, he told the Beeb.

Mattress chewed
The wasps had chewed through the bed’s mattress and pillows in order to give the nest more room to grow.

How did the wasps get in to start building this monster? The homeowner had left a small window open, giving the wasps a way in, then three months later, a bed of wasps was made.

If you now go and check your own windows, we’d fully understand.

US wasp nest engulfs armchair base
Sadly the BBC didn’t have any photos of the Hampshire nest, but when researching this story, we found a video, shot in the US, of a nest built by a wasps genus (Yellow Jackets, in the US, as Wikipedia tells us) engulfing the base of an armchair

Image: haquintero under a CC BY 2.0 license