A Wasp Epidemic

We first discovered we had a wasp nest... or rather... three wasps nests at the beginning of summer. Ryan took them out with some wasp spray. We later found a wasp nest in our umbrella and one between the weights in Ryan's hoist machine. After spraying them all we didn't have much of a problem.

And then came today.

About a week or so ago Ryan commented on how he was seeing wasps but looked around and couldn't find a nest. Then, just as I was about to hose down our Adirondack chairs today I noticed a really weird looking wasp just chilling on the arm. I'm thinking it was the queen. Ryan then found one wasp squeezing it's little self into a small hole in the wall, right above the kitchen window. We then made an executive decision, and despite the fact that it wasn't dusk we were going to kill the queen while she was there. Ryan sprayed the heck out of the queen wasp. The beauty of wasp spray is that it can spray up to 27 feet, no joke. Of course Ryan wanted to get up closer so he was probably only 2 feet away from the thing. He then decided after killing the queen he was going to take down the nest, so he pivoted, and sprayed the heck out of all the little holes in the area. We then watched the wasps immediately fall to the ground one by one. There was one who was holding on and waving his little butt around on the window. More wasps started to come and were flying about...
And of course, it is at this opportune moment that our cat decides to reappear in our backyard. She sees the wasps flying around and can't resist herself. She runs all over the yard, jumping, and flipping in the air to catch them. Despite Ryan yelling no at her and me warning her "you're going to get stung", she got one. And sure enough, she got stung.

We brought her inside but she didn't seem to be bothered at all and Ryan couldn't find the stinger. We were starting to wonder if she actually got stung. Not even 3 minutes later and we noticed that her paw was HUGE! After looking again for a stinger and not finding one, and after performing a little research on the internet (thank you Goggle), we put some ice on her - what used to be little - paw. She didn't like it much, and just wanted to go back outside. She spent the rest of the day lazing around, not effected at all, other than one giant paw.