When "Kill It With Fire" Goes A Little Too Far

[LadyofArc]

Man tries to kill a spider with a blow torch and accidentally sets his apartment alight

Well I guess that's one way to kill a spider.

[Ironclad Alibi]

They should have done what my father always did with spiders. Get a can of bug spray and drown it. Yes, the spider would drown before the poison could kill it.

[catcul]

A woman tried to kill a snake in her yard with fire. She ended up burning her house to the ground.

[Nunavut Pants]

Reminds me of....

[dalesys]

We used to check how dry the June Grass was by dropping a lit match...
Damp => no flame.
Getting Dry ==> swing foot, one step, out.
Kinda Dry ==> short clog dance.
Amphetamized tap-dancing elephant! ==> Time to stop dropping matches!

[Mikkel]

Reminds me of a family story.
My mothers uncle Harald had a farm and he had trouble with rats under a storage shed.
He decided to gas them. He had carbide for his bicycle lamp and put a good bit down the rat holes and poured water after it.
He was standing, waiting to see if the rats would run out or just stay down the holes, when he thought he saw something move down one of the holes. Without thinking he struck a match to look down the rat hole and BOOM, the shed, and much of the ground around it, blew up.
He got rid of the rats (and his eyebrows), though.

[taxguykarl]

Well I guess that's one way to kill a spider.

The article doesn't say if the spider was actually killed

[LadyofArc]

The article doesn't say if the spider was actually killed

Funnily enough my partner actually did manage to kill a spider with fire. Or to be more specific, he set a spider on fire once when he was a kid. He'd grabbed a can of what he THOUGHT was fly spray only to discover that it was surface spray (as in, cleaning spray). So he decided to set the damn thing alight and see what happened.

He described it as very...anticlimatic.

[MoonCat]

A woman I worked with years ago said her husband tried to get rid of a hornet's nest under their siding using a blowtorch.

Yes, it turned out to be a bad decision.

[taxguykarl]

How did it work out, MC?

[Tanasi]

Many years ago a friend discovered a yellow jacket nest the hard way. After dark he poured a quart of gasoline in the hole in the ground. I lit it. What we didn't know was the hole went into a small culvert pipe. When I lit the gas it blew a fire-ball out the end of the culvert pipe straight into the nearby wood lands and we were in the middle of a drought. Bad things just about happened but we were able to put out the fire with a nearby water hose.
Before I was born back during the midevil times my grandfather had a corn crib that was infested with mice, rats and other various forms of vermin. He poured kerosene on it and touched it off. Flaming rats ran every which way. Fun was not had by all.

[LadyofArc]

Flaming rats ran every which way.

The mental image of that is way too funny.

[Mental_Mouse]

One of my late hiking buddies found what he thought was a sinkhole in his yard, and tried to dig it up to pack-and-fill.

He didn't realize that down here, yellowjackets make ground nests. He got serious cellulitis on his arm from all the stings!

[Blue Ginger]

Just looked up yellow jackets because I wasn't sure what they were.

Jesus freaking christ! and I thought we had some big bugs in Oz. So glad that the wasps we have don't have nests that get that big.

We have native bees, european bees and wasps, but wasps aren't that common. If you find a nest, all you have to do is report them to your local council/shire and they send out the exterminator. They are classified as pests, so can be destroyed without too many dramas.

[Mental_Mouse]

Just looked up yellow jackets because I wasn't sure what they were.

Jesus freaking christ! and I thought we had some big bugs in Oz.

We have native bees, european bees and wasps, but wasps aren't that common. If you find a nest, all you have to do is report them to your local council/shire and they send out the exterminator. They are classified as pests, so can be destroyed without too many dramas.

Oddly, I have several nests of very large wasps in my front yard, and I'm not at all concerned.

Cicada-killers are likely to be the largest wasps you'll see (at least on this continent), but they're also among the least dangerous. The females are a good inch and a half long (males are half that), but they won't sting you unless you actually grab them hard or step on them. The site "What's that bug?" couldn't find anyone who'd actually been stung by one, but they found a published account that described the sting as "like a thumbtack". (They also had pictures of people with several sitting peacefully on their hands.) And these are solitary wasps -- each nest-hole belongs to one female, with up to a dozen or so egg chambers beneath..