I had to do something ugly today. We live in an older house with a lot of stonework and masonry around the entrances, and that masonry is showing signs of age, crumbling away quite a bit. That, unfortunately, seems to be a magnet for yellow jackets, who home in on all those crevices, worsen the problem by digging, and make nice homey nests in the interior spaces of our house. It was particularly awful last year; the front porch was covered with crumbling cement and rock, and every time we closed the door we'd hear a little cascade of grit and stone tumble down. There were thousands of those insects nesting here. We had to go on a real bug hunt, hosing the entrances with insecticide and finding our way into the dark and dusty attic, where we found a nest bigger than my head and whole armies of vicious creatures on patrol. Fortunately, we had a mechanical power loader on hand and were able to defeat the queen in a brutal one-on-one final battle (OK, I lied—we stood back and sprayed the nest with a stream of insecticide. But the battle is more dramatic.) For weeks afterwards, poisoned insects would come stumbling out of the walls and ceiling spaces to spaz out on the floor, pointing their chitinous tarsi at us and gasping out curses with their dying breaths.

I didn't like it.

This year, I thought I'd be smart. I got these lovely organic bait traps, no toxins involved, that were supposed to draw them in and drown them. They didn't work at all…not one insect succumbed to their temptations. So, once again this morning, I had to resort to the nasty neurotoxins.

Here's the lethal substance of choice, tralomethrin:

This is a rather potent pyrethroid ester insecticide; it works by modifying the gating kinetics of the insect sodium channel, increasing the length of time that the channel remains open after a stimulus, thereby depolarizing the neuron for a longer period of time. In plain speech, it makes their brains misfire, killing them in a hyperactive snow crash. This is not nice stuff. If they were people, this would be outlawed by the Geneva Convention, and the newspaper articles describing it would be full of words like "horror" and "atrocity" and "sick bastard".

There isn't a lot of human toxicity information on tralomethrin, but it looks nasty, and I don't trust it. It kills fish quite well (it has a rating of "very highly toxic"), so I'm sure it would be just as bad to me; there has been much obsessive-compulsive hand-washing in the Myers household this morning. The only good thing about it is that it has a fairly short half-life in the environment where I've used it, about 3 days, so I can console myself that I probably haven't done any lasting damage to the environment.

I guess this post is a confession. I was bad. I hate using this stuff. What penance should I do, and what alternatives do people suggest, since I know this is going to be a yearly phenomenon?