Our house was destructively pummeled with large hail several months ago, and starting early tomorrow, they will begin to re-side the entire structure, and just when the two cats were starting to recover from the trauma of last week's roofing crew pounding and banging around up there, the siding crew will be sending them back into the little room under the stairs every day for most of the next week..
Poor kitties!
But at least they weren't risking very real and total destruction, as were the small colony of paper wasps who built their nest under a plastic corner piece on the garage, that was now fully exposed by a large hailstone strike during the storm.
The siding crew would certainly destroy them in the process of their work.
But I had hatched a plan.
This morning, before heading off to work (astride my Vespa, by the way), I took some tightly rolled strips of paper towels, applied a tiny smear of bee honey on the ends, stuck it near them, and as soon as the wasps got a whiff of the honey, they just stepped onto the paper and enthusiastically started to slurp up the sweet too. I'm sure they were near starvation considering the time of year and early fall temperatures.
I had places the Waspatorium nearby, and simply carefully placed the paper towel strips, hungry wasp included, into the safety of the Waspatorium, eight times.
There is still one straggler left that I couldn't get to climb onto the paper strip, so had to leave that one until later today when I return from work at around 5:00 when I'll see if I can collect that last one.
When they're all moved into the Waspatorium, I'll detach their little paper best and place it in the enclosure with them. We might have all nine of them over the winter now.