Courtesy of A&E's "Billy the Exterminator" (what does bug killing have to do with the "arts"?)
He was hired to kill rats in a Louisiana soup kitchen. The situation was SO bad that giant cockroaches were eating the peanut butter off the traps before the rats could even get to them. His solution was to put glue traps for the roaches on either side of the rat traps and then to screw a drywall screw right above the rat trap which he smeared with peanut butter. The roaches apparently can't climb out on the screw to reach the bait. The rats avoid the glue traps but have to stand on the trap treadle to get the PB. SNAP! I smiled when I saw that he used just what I do to trap squirrels - a family sized jar of peanut butter. He also wraps the trap treadle in bologna
Next day there were dozens of rats in the traps flanked by even more cockroaches stuck in the glue traps. I don't know what you N'Owlin'ers feed them, but the rats were as big as squirrels and the cockroaches the size of mice. He ended up with a trashbag FULL of rats.
I've seen lots of rats in my time but these suckers were ENORMOUS. I remember going behind a local supermarket late at night looking for cardboard boxes when I was moving. As I drove up to the dock, there were dozens of pairs of tiny little rat eyes reflected in my headlights, looking at me. I decided I'd get boxes somewhere else. And shop for food somewhere else.
Now he's fighting bees in short sleeves, attaching something I've never seen before (a bee box) to a hole above the front door where they're getting into the house. He's gotten stung so badly he's fallen off the ladder. It may not be art, but I guess it's entertaining! (-:
When I had a bee problem, I used a leather jacket, two pairs of pants (stiff new blue jeans and sweat pants over them), and a "bee hat" I made with some Fiberglas screening and an old ball cap. I still got stung, but I could tell by all the torn-off stingers I found on the outermost layers I wore on top of it all that I would have been stung a dozen times or more without it. If I had to do it again, I'd get a Tyvek bee suit. They also had an interesting portable sprayer that looked a little like a leaf blower they used to blow eugenol into a bee-infested dead tree. If I ever have another serious bee problem, I might modify a leaf blower to do the same.
While Billy wasn't wearing a bee suit, in the background of one of the shots showing him pulling this huge hive out of the foyer ceiling you could see a cameraman suited up from head to toe in a bee suit. At least someone on the set had a brain. On a later episode they used half a bee suit (upper) only. That made them half-wits instead of witless! The bees very quickly figured out Billy's fashion faux pas and stung the living daylights out of him from the waist down.
Bobby G.