Don’t bug me, you rat

SUE CLARK

I’ve got the bee thing down now. Last year, I wrote about being one

window pane removed from a swarm of bees -- all of them eventually

clumped onto my neighbor’s wall. This year, I got a call from a

neighbor who heard about that encounter.

“Sue, I have bees everywhere! They’re coming into the house. There

must be a hundred of them! Wait, make that a thousand. Help!”

I told her about the clumping phenomenon, in which the workers

eventually settle on a surface in preparation for their queen.

“That’s great, but now there’s a least a million, and they’re in.

My. House.”

It’s quite scary to witness your first swarm, but after a few

encounters, you become a seasoned bee professional. I told her to

check with the condo association, and soon there was a bee-busting

duo at her place. One was the boss, and he had brought a smaller,

younger assistant with him.

“Don’t worry,” he told my neighbor. “We’ll kill them.”

Then he pointed to his assistant, who had hastily pulled a sheet

over his head.

“Go up and kill them,” the boss said to the sheeted figure and

pointed to a ladder. The apprentice clambered blindly up the ladder,

spraying with a small can of repellent, appearing as happy as anyone

could be under the circum- stances.

The bees were eventually dispatched, and they must have planned

revenge, because a week later, they decided the wall around my dryer

would meet their little bee needs perfectly. I was stoic by this time

and strolled nonchalantly by the swarm, brazenly going about my

laundry chores. I called the Bee Man and Robin, who again took the

buzzing denizens on and won. (Although I haven’t seen his assistant

around for awhile, which concerns me).

The months passed, and I saw my neighbor again. She looked

dejected.

“We have rats,” she said. “In the walls”.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“You can hear them in the wall in my bedroom. They run around and

scratch right by my head.”

I talked to her a few weeks later and heard that Rat Man and Robin

had again come to the rescue. He had killed a huge rat in her

crawlspace and kept pulling it out of a trash bag to show it to

everyone.

This time, I was the disciple, learning rat wisdom at my

neighbor’s knee. Here are some tips if you have these visitors:

* Don’t use the traps that cause the rat or mouse to stick to the

trap and be unable to move. They will get themselves unstuck and go

back into the walls and stick to the walls. Then you have rats dying

in your walls. In addition to having to get them out, you have, shall

we say, a distinctive odor.

* Use the old-fashioned spring trap and put them away from the

walls and bait them with peanut butter. Then the rats will be

definitely dead and outside of the walls.

* Make sure you don’t leave out trash with food in it (the

majority of my trash). I now make a trip to the dumpster in my condo

area with every full trash bag.

* Check around your house for any holes not covered by netting. I

don’t care where you live and how affluent the neighborhood.

I’ll save the mosquito threat for another day, but I once found a

coyote in my backyard when I lived in Newport Heights.

But I digress. I am sure I’ll hear from the rodent protection

agency, but I plan to sic Rat Man on them.

* SUE CLARK is a Costa Mesa resident and a high school guidance

counselor at Creekside High School in Irvine. She can

be reached at tallteacher @comcast.net.