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LETITIA STEINA two-man team successfully clears out a mobile home that became a lair for a host of yellow jackets.
DOVER - From a distance, the window of the white mobile home sagged under the weight of what looked like an out-of-control papier mache experiment.
Folds of gray paper bulged from the window frame, blotting out the sunlight. Inside the abandoned home, the mass stood 10 feet tall and sloped like a sand dune onto the floor.
Inside, more than 200,000 yellow jackets buzzed around their home in this rural east Hillsborough community, poised as always to defend against any threat to the nest that took them three years to build.
They put up a good fight Monday night.
As dusk descended and the yellow jackets settled in for the night, a two-man team from the Tampa extermination company Insect IQ donned leather gloves and face masks. The professional bug busters took no chances. With duct tape, they sealed white coveralls into rubber boots.
"If you need me, just give me a holler," said Bob Luccarini, 55, assigned to diffuse the guard hornets around the window while his partner attacked the nest inside.
"I will," said Jonathan Simkins, 38, an entomologist and the company's owner. He shook his head, took a final look and flashed the thumbs up signal to go ahead.
In a year, he might work a dozen nests this large in Florida. The crew could not recall seeing such a massive nest in the Tampa Bay area for at least two years.
Yellow jackets are small wasps with distinctive yellow and black markings. Often confused with bees, they are related to hornets. Like hornets, yellow jackets make nests of paper by chewing old wood and plant fibers. They nest underground, hanging from trees, inside walls.
They defend their nests aggressively - and unlike bees, they can sting repeatedly. With each sting, they release a chemical that acts as a marker to guide the others to a target. Simkins barely had time to react when he blazed inside the home.
"I looked down, and I was covered with them," he said. "I'm fortunate that I've done a few of these, or I would have panicked."
The insects' defense mechanism can kill. In 2002, an 83-year-old man died near his home in Keystone from the venom of nearly 300 stings. Albert Wellner was mowing in the woods when he disturbed a large underground nest under a cover of pine needles.
Four years earlier, a 2-year-old boy died after yellow jackets swarmed him at a mobile home in Town 'N Country.
Typically, people die from allergic reactions to the venom. Professionals advise seeking medical attention for multiple stings.
Even with his protective gear, Simkins felt the sting of at least four yellow jackets. For him, it's an occupational hazard. But the neighbors could have fared far worse.
Insect IQ discovered the nest after a phone call from Nettie Sims, 76, who owns the property around the abandoned home and lives in another mobile home about 20 feet away.
The company charges between $75 and $600 to remove a yellow jacket nest, so Sims waited a year before she made the call.
"Nobody hardly comes over," she said. She and her granddaughter treaded carefully around the vacant home for years.
When the professionals got to to work Monday night, she closed her doors. A neighbor's children watched from behind a chain-link fence, then quickly retreated inside.
It took the extermination team more than an hour to destroy the nest. As Simkins shined a flashlight on piles of yellow jacket carcases, he marvelled that no one had gotten hurt.
"This nest was probably a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10," he said.
- Times researcher Jenny Lichtenwalner contributed to this report.