A Winchester pest control professional thought he had seen it all when it came to insects, but then he came across a wasp nest the size of which he had never seen before.
The exterminator, John Birkett, was called in by a woman to de-insect her second-floor bedroom, and was shocked to discover a huge wasp nest built on the bed. It turns out that the woman lived mostly on the first floor, and rarely went up to the second-floor room.
Birkett estimated that the huge colony contained at least 5,000 wasps, thousands of larvae, and 500 young queens. He spent hours in a room wearing a special suit to deal with the vast swarm.
Birkett told Sky News: "When I entered the room, I saw the most amazing sight I have ever seen in my professional life. The woman asked me to keep her nice blanket, but when I broke the nest into pieces, I discovered that the wasps had penetrated through the blanket, the pillow, and even pierced the mattress.".
Birkett broke the nest into pieces and discovered a 'wonderful pattern of an active colony,' and thousands of wasps tried to attack him, and he was forced to spray the place for long hours: "I felt uneasy that I had to kill thousands of animals, but wasps are a dangerous animal and I couldn't leave any alive. The sting of a wasp is dangerous even after it dies," Birkett said.
Birkett has been an exterminator for 40 years, and he says that he has been called in to handle quite a few wasp nests, but they were no larger than the diameter of a tennis ball.
A wasp nest looks like paper mache. It is made by chewing wood and then gluing the chewed material to other pieces until a honeycomb structure is formed.
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