Synchronise your watches: Operation Jasper commences at 0600 tomorrow...

Another lovely autumn afternoon, sunny, but thick black clouds intermittently passing overhead, shedding only a few drops of rain, and then the sun again. Here's how the area I was working today looked back in March. That's the manure heap covered in an orange plastic sheet in the background. Since March, it's sunken to half that height, and accumulated a lot of bits and pieces as I've worked: the shed's roof timbers, a lot of bricks dug up during the year of more digging.

I cleared away all of these odds and ends, lastly the bricks holding the plastic sheet down onto the heap. The activity seemed to communicate itself to the wasps, and I was glad to finish and leave.


Maybe it was my imagination, but activity at the entrance to the nest began to increase.  I read somewhere that autumn brings a whole load of crazy shit to a wasps' nest. The queen leaves to hibernate elsewhere, and, leaderless, the wasps turn to fermented fruit and cannibalism to pass the time. They seemed to milling around rather aimlessy. Earlier in the summer, they would shoot in and out of the entrance and whizz away so fast it was impossible to be sure if they were wasps - they were too fast to see, and I just couldn't make an i.d. This morning, there was no doubt, these guys milling around are wasps.

Anyway, Operation Jasper. Tomorrow, in the pre-dawn, about 6am, enter the allotment, and with no further ado, whip the plastic sheet off the manure heap, and then quickly depart. IF the nest lies between the manure and the sheet, they'll be exposed to the elements and done for as soon as it rains. If, however, the nest is in the manure, well, back to drawing board. But at least the plastic sheet is out of way of the dogs and their tug-o-war antics.

I hope it's a chilly morning. Raining preferably.

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