An exterminator ended up being called to remove an enormous hornets nest that had built up inside an old car in Ohio.
Wearing protective gloves and triple-layered clothing, the bee removal specialist pumped the nest full of insecticide to kill off the hornets in the town of Alliance.
Hundreds of them began swarming around the vehicle as they tried to make an escape.
Travis Watson was called to tackle a hornet nest that was built inside an old El Camino car
He reaches in and slowly topples the rest of the nest to the bottom of the seat, crumpling it. The wasps erupt in a frenzy. He backs away and grabs the smoker again to tame them
The bee removal specialist filmed the extermination process and uploaded the footage to his Facebook page
The car which had clearly been sitting in the area for some time was already completely overgrown with bushes and rusting away, however, there would have been no realistic way to have the vehicle moved out of the area without the nest being taken away first.
After pumping the nest full of toxic fumes, Travis Watson began to rip the nest apart piece by piece.
As he pulled chunks of the nest out of the car with his gloved hands, the intricate honeycombed interior of the nest could be seen.
It caused even more hornets to start flying around and act even more aggressively as they attempted to defend their nest and the queen inside.
Watson took great care when handling the hornet nest and successfully removed it from the car. First he had to spay some white powder which is a pesticide
Video shows the hornets swarming as an exterminator destroyed their nest, which stretched from the car’s ceiling all the way down the driver’s side seat
A honeycomb structure shows what the nest looked like from the inside
The hornets, which look for confined spaces away from the elements, had got into the vehicle through a crack in the window
As Watson removed the pieces of the nest, he placed them into a plastic bag.
To most viewers just watching the footage is enough to send shivers down their spine, but Watson remains completely calm and barely makes a sound as he takes away every last bit.
‘On this one, I was nervous because I’ve never seen a European hornet nest this big,’ Watson, who has worked in the field for 13 years, told The Washington Post. He said the hornets were also bouncing off a screen protecting his face. ‘How could your adrenaline not be pumping when you’re doing something like this?’
He backs off briefly before tackling the nest once more spraying more of the suffocating mixture into the car and nest before removing the larger pieces of bit by bit.
All the while, hundreds of the hornets swirl around him as he continues to remove the nest, occasionally spraying more of the pesticide smoke.
Watson pumped pesticide into the hornets’ nest before breaking it apart into smaller pieces
Watson wore sting-proof gloves and three layers of protective clothing to avoid the hornets
As Watson breaks the nest apart, piece by piece he says, ‘I’m gonna need a bigger bag.’
The nest was estimated to weigh between three and four pounds, filling several plastic bags
Some of the hornets are enormous with the queen seen to be the size of his thumb at more than an inch-and-a-half.
The nest, which he estimated to weigh between three and four pounds, filled several plastic bags. ‘I’m gonna need a bigger bag!’ he says at one point.
Watson is also a beekeeper who rescues honeybees but he said he exterminates hornets because they are pests and can kill bees.
‘People must exercise extreme caution around a nest as they defend their nest aggressively,’ said Watson.
Usually the hornets build nests in the hollows of trees. ‘Their queens emerge from hibernation in April and look for a well protected place to build and they start it completely from scratch,’ he said. ‘It takes a long time to get workers in the nest, to where the queen starts to only lay eggs, and starting in July, it starts growing quite rapidly.’
The nest was hanging inside of the car, along with 1,000 hornets which then went crazy
There was no way the car could have been moved until the hornet’s nest was destroyed