Pest Control

Along about lunch time this afternoon, The Lovely Bride announces that there's a bee on the ceiling in the living room.  I looked at it and it weren't no bee.  It was some kind of wasp or hornet.  Striped like a yellow jacket but considerably bigger.  It looked like it was chewing on the ceiling so I didn't want to wait for it to leave of its own volition.

I balled up a big wool boot sock and proceeded to miss it about a dozen times before a memory gave me the solution.

A few decades back, the Lovely Bride and I had rented an old farmhouse that turned out to be  infested with wolf spiders.  Now that I have checked on line they looked more like Huntsman Spiders but we call them wolf spiders around here so I'll stick with that.  Whatever they are, they are generally harmless but TLB has a psychotic fear of spiders and it just didn't make for a happy home to have herds of spiders as big as your hand roaming the house at night.

Wolf (Huntsman?) spiders are generally too fast to hit with spray and they are quick enough that they are hard to hit with a magazine or to stomp with a shoe so I came up with an effective solution in the reloading room.

The Lovely Bride had a revolver in .32 H&R Magnum and I primed a few cases, put a pinch of AA#2 in each (I measured the charges, I just don't remember the data) and then filled the cases with uncooked grits.  Topped them off with  over shot wads cut from notebook paper secured with nail polish and had nice little shot shells to use indoors.

One of the fun things about those spiders is that their eyes shine when you hit them with a spotlight.  I'd walk around the house at night with a flashlight until I saw a pair of beady little eyes looking at me and then I'd blast it to kingdom come with the .32 shotshells.  The grits didn't penetrate the drywall but would blow a spider to bits at close range.  When you swept up the spider bits you also cleaned up the grits. 

Not wanting to hit the bee/wasp/hornet with a broom and have it come after me in the house, I charged a .357 Mag. case with a pinch of WW231 and topped it off with cornmeal.  Didn't need an overshot wad because I would be pointing the gun at the ceiling.  I took aim, asked the obligatory question ("Do you feel lucky?") and let him have it.

That's where expansion ratios intervened.  You can make a .32 work well enough but when you move up to a larger bore, the powder just isn't fast enough to burn well because the grits or corn meal don't weigh much.  There was a soft little "pop" and it didn't blow the beast to smithereens.  All it did was make it fly to the nearest window where TLB beat it to a pulp with a shoe.

All things considered, it was a successful hunt.  We wanted the thing off the ceiling and we didn't want to get stung in the process.  We accomplished both without damaging the ceiling or anything else besides the bug.  Then we ate our hamburgers and went back to our normal lives.