speaking of bug movies, slither is on right now, and im more grossed out then scared by it haha

You want bugs? Try South East Asia!

I had to sleep on the floor downstairs last June when I broke my ankle in 3 places trying to run UP the stairs. I was woken by a itchy feeling on my left shoulder. I turned and looked and it was an enormous roach. To say I hate roaches would be a gross understatement. Ever tried paincking with a busted ankle?

More recently, I had a nasty thing land on my head - looked like a cross between a roach (don't fly that well) and a praying mantis. Yuk! About 10 years ago (when I was my larger 138Kg self) I was stung on the head by an enormous hornet. I was only saved by my physical bulk. They can and do kill. Then there are very big centipedes that bite viciously - not as big as the Aussie one, I admit. Swarming red ants take your fancy? I was once on a golf course, just north of BKK and we came up to a tee-box, to be confronted by a quite bizarre sight. There was an expat, totally naked, about 200 yards down on the LHS of the fairway, being beaten with a towel by his caddy. Odd sexual pursuasions aside, it was difficult to comprehend what we were seeing. It turns out that he had hooked his ball left and it was under a tree. In his backswing, his club shattered a nest of large, angry red ants and they were all over him. Yuk!

For smaller bugs, get a few geckos in. They eat the lot.

Snakes? Nah, that needs a new thread.
Cheers!

You mean like these?




Or this one maybe?

Those scutigera centipedes that fazstp posted are common across most of the US. They're actually good to have around the house--they're predators and eat any other insect that can catch, including spiders and cockroaches, and they're fast. They are pretty scary looking with all those legs though.

Woke up the other night with something itching my shoulder. I flicked it off and heard something hit the wall. Turned on the light and there was a millipede. Damned things are everywhere.
To add to that I had to pay an exorbitant sum to have a wasps nest removed from the outside wall of my bedroom on Tuesday last. The insects are taking over (make that invertibrates; millipedes aren't insects). Let's hope this winter is cold enough to thin their numbers a bit.
Now, where in Melbourne do you live, Faz? That's an area I'll avoid. Never seen one of those before.
We don't get funnel webs in Melbourne yet, tlarkin, but global warming will probably fix that. Everything else seems to moving south. Next we'll have the cane toad here.

I live north in Glenroy but I saw that type of centipede on the wall of a flat I was renting in Fairfield. We do get heaps of the Portuguese Millipedes around here. Also heaps of Redbacks which seem to like Slaters as there are always plenty of Slater corpses littering the ground around their webs. Oh yeah, and the Mole Crickets that I posted a short recording of in another thread.

Ahhhh... Glenroy redbacks. Back in the early '60s I, as a technician-in-training, was installing phones in the new houses in the heartbreak streets off Pascoe Vale Rd. Had to go under the houses and I met lots of Glenroy redbacks. Killed a lot. Got bitten - not nice at all.
They called them heartbreak streets because there were no sewers, drains or made roads. In the winter the streets were black mud. In the summer it was dust. It could take 5 years or more before these services were in place.

I'm pleased to report these days we have bitumen and indoor plumbing :D. No Foxtel or Optus cable though. Maybe in another 5 years :rolleyes:.

Huh. I was going to ask "does anyone know how to remove a wasp's nest that's in a difficult place?". You see, we just bought a cottage, and there's a shed with a GIANT nest. Trouble is, it's kinda hard to get at. See my diagram (horrible!) from the side.
And the nest is in the corner of that "shelf" -- hard to get at.

Any ideas?

Can you simply ignore it?

Or wait for the cold season, assuming you have one?

Burn the shed down?

Ignore: We often change in that shed to go swimming -- it's a waterfront. Wasps are aggressive and it's really annoying to have to be slow. We also have a kayak and paddleboat in there, and a ton of equipment related. Ignoring is not an option.

Cold season: They'll come back. Ontario/Québec is cold in winter, but the queen will survive.

Burn: No. We don't have any other storage, other than two ancient trailers (an Airstream and some other one).

How about spray, is that a good idea.

I was thinking wait until the winter before doing anything about it - they should be semi-hibernating and much easier to deal with than in the summer.

The spray better take out the whole nest rather quickly, or you'll just make them angry. We don't want to make them angry.

One of my relatives told me this story:

On his boat (he lives on the Okanagan, in Lake Country, B.C.), he found a wasp's nest. He went on the boat at 6 AM with some spray, and began spraying. Soon they started falling out. When he was done, the pile of dead wasps was 2 1/2 FEET TALL. Enough wasps :D.

--

But really we use that shed a lot and we're planning another couple of months visiting the cottage, which is a 1/2 hour away from my place. We'll try spray and see.

+1 for keeping the spiders around.

I try to avoid disturbing the fishermen type (web makers) and the hunter type (rovers / hoppers). Let them do their thing because they ward off the ants, eat up the tiny flying things, and rarely, manage to net small roaches, I think. Unfortunately though, they sometimes kill each other. The hunter spiders will sometimes get stuck in a competing spider's web, and they don't have a chance once that happens.

I keep them away from my bed. That's it.. but they don't really show up a lot.

Yeah, but Bangkok is basically a giant dead-zone. The only bugs that hang out here are the hardcore scavengers, and a few parasites. (Okay, I guess you could argue that all bugs are either scavengers or parasites.) Compared to Virginia, the biodiversity here is quite minimal. Any insects that you can find here, you'll also find in VA, but there will be more variety over there, and they are generally bigger and stronger. The masses of albino geckos contribute to that, but mostly its due to eradication of anything organic within the city, and replacement of it with concrete.

Speaking of hornets / bees, there is a giant hive hanging from the Arc de Triomphe in the capital city of Vientiane, Laos.

The street vendors in BKK who sell fruit juices always have a permanent swarm of bees frolicking on the fruit, and swimming in the syrup, etc.

You can buy WaspKiller at Home Depot: Looks like the pic below, except the label says Wasp Killer rather than the Ant Killer shown. It's set up so you can shoot a stream from a distance. The clue is to hit the hole in the bottom of the nest first. They don't all die immediately, but if you then soak the paper nest, they'll all die soon and you can safely remove the nest. Been there, done that with a nest in a very awkward place under our deck.

I was waiting for a water bus at a dock in BK and there was a fruit stand right next to the place where you bought tickets (for like 2/3 of a cent, Cdn) and a roach skuttled over my shoe that was at least 3" long. Never saw anything like it.

Unbeknownst to me, we'd taken care of these wasps. Only a couple of living ones, ROFD (Rolling On Floor Dead). My dad emptied 400 mL (a full can) of spray on the nest. He'll come back with more to destroy the thing entirely, as well as the one under our porch.

No one mentioned wolf spiders.