Yellow Jacket Nest - In The HOUSE???

A yellow jacket nest in the house sounds like a nightmare! We found a big one under the bathroom sink! It was not a happy find.

It was quite large.... we forgot to measure it exactly, but judging by a picture I have of it with one son's hand next to it, we are estimating it to be about 13" x 8".... like I said, it was pretty big.

Here is the bathroom sink cabinet where we had a water leak, but didn't know it. By the time we found it, most of the bottom of the cabinet was saturated. The guys tore it out and took it out to the driveway and when they put it down on its back, they found this  stuck to the underside.

They called me to come to see it.... I had a hard time imagining that had been IN our house for quite some time. Shudder.

We have lived in our house for about 18 years and this cabinet was here when we moved in... we have painted it a few times and there was no water leak until more recently... and we have no idea how long that nest was in there. For a while, we found a few yellow jackets inside and couldn't figure out WHY.

 This is one of those times that a problem(the leak under the sink), became a blessing (finding and removing this hive from our home)!

I guess we could say that another blessing was the impromptu homeschool lesson from the find.... with a great exhibit.   :) 

Thankfully, there were no living yellow jackets... but there were some dead ones.

 We homeschool and encourage exploring, so of course, the guys had to seriously investigate this thing. :) 

There were several layers to it.... they removed the outer shell to find the stacks of combs. There were 7 of these layers inside the outer shell.

It is a pretty amazing work of these creatures... the uniformity of the compartments, the marvel of the engineering.... 

It was interesting since there were no living wasps to try to avoid. 

 The whole nest was very lightweight and papery. This is what my guys told me... I didn't actually TOUCH it. :)   Seeing it was enough for me.

Here the top (or bottom actually) was lifted of to expose the other sections.

  So many perfectly formed sections.

An interesting work....

 Sorry about the color of this one... wrong angle with the sun, but this one shows the supports between the layers.

 I am glad this isn't in our house anymore... and I am glad the yellow jackets were already dead.  The sink cabinet was dismantled and thrown in the trash... by the way, the pictures here have shown the ugly wetness, but the cabinet still looked really good from the outside. We would have continued to use it if the water hadn't damaged it so much.

Currently, we have no sink in the bathroom and are looking on craigslist for another one... or we may buy one new.  We are looking and praying. Thankfully there is no leak and thankfully, we have another bathroom. :) It would be nice to get this project done, as it was not on the project list... and we have been working on several things ON the project list, and have been pretty busy.

I was reminded that the leak we found that was such an overwhelming addition to our already overloaded lives.... was actually a blessing in disguise. I wonder how many times that is true. This time, we were able to SEE it, but even if we can't see it....  I wonder how many times God is actually doing His work in our lives... and we just complain. Hmmmm...... it is certainly something to think about.  Thank you for visiting my blog today. :) 

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