this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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These things appeared in friends flat. What are they?

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[โ€“] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I just dealt with them a couple of months ago, absolute fucking nightmare. What solved it in the end was parasitic wasps - you can order them online. I received 3 letters in the mail a couple of weeks apart, each containing a small paper card with parasitic wasp eggs, which you put close to the source of larvae. The wasps lay their eggs inside the larvae eggs, but you'll need to use all three letters to get all larvae throughout their cycle.

Sounds weird as fuck, but immediately solved the problem.

[โ€“] JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

... How did you get rid of the wasps? Or is it a 'they live here now, Bob's the king of section 3-b' sort of thing?

[โ€“] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 16 points 3 weeks ago

Getting rid of the wasps was easy, the frogs took care of them. The annoying part was getting rid of the snakes...

Nah, the wasps are tiny, I could barely see specks of dust moving around. They just died off after the larvae were gone.

[โ€“] Fosheze@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Gonna be honest chief, I would sooner burn my house down than live with wasps.

But thinking about it, I'm willing to bet that house centipedes would clear them up too. Those voracious little buggers eat everything.

[โ€“] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Luckily they are tiny tiny wasps, like specks of dust. Anything bigger and I would have run!

[โ€“] Fosheze@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Oh, cool! When you said parasitic wasp my brain immediately pictured a tarantula hawk wasp.

[โ€“] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

Anything fruitfly and above would have meant I'll just move, but yours sounds so much more horrifying. Oh god.

[โ€“] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The parasitic ones (well, parasitoid since they live free as adults) are very different, sometimes literally microscopic, and never harmful to humans AFAIK.

Gruesomely fascinating and widely studied, though. Relevant recent XKCD.