Tuesday, August 22, 2006

This Can't be Good

montgomeryadvertiser.com?::? Giant nests perplex experts: "MOBILE -- To the bafflement of insect experts, gigantic yellow jacket nests have started turning up in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.

Specialists say it could be the result of a mild winter and drought conditions, or multiple queens forcing worker yellow jackets to enlarge their quarters so the queens will be in separate areas. But experts haven't determined exactly what's behind the surprisingly large nests.

Auburn University entomologists, who say they've never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama's Black Belt.

At one site in Barbour County, the nest was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, said Andy McLean, an Orkin pesticide service manager in Dothan who helped remove it from an abandoned barn about a month ago."

1 comment:

Jayme Lynn Blaschke said...

Over in the Kleburg Building at A&M (or is it Heep?) there's a nine-foot wasp nest which was removed from a south Texas culvert some decades ago. There were supposedly 500,000 wasps in the colony when they gassed it (and it wasn't even close to being a world record). That entomology class I took opened my eyes to some bizarre things, I can tell you!