Have you ever experienced any infestations/problems with insects?

[TDAS04]

What are some unpleasant experiences that you remember where you had to deal with numerous bugs?  It could have been an infestation or an unusually large population of a certain species in your area, several creatures causing problems in your own home, etc.

When I was in high school, an estimated 6,000 bees settled down in the basement wall, and an exterminator was definitely needed.  I'm pretty sure that there is lots of honey in the wall.

Living a climate with cold winters means that my region doesn't experience that many problems with various creatures, at least compared to places like Florida.  However, depending on the year, there may be so many grasshoppers (my area is prairie), that you can't walk through tall grass without them hopping, flying, and buzzing everywhere. 

What are some problematic experiences with insects you've had?  They don't necessarily have to be about insects.  If you've had similar moments dealing with snakes or rats or other creatures, you can talk about that too.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Fruit flies laid eggs in our garbage disposal, so we have an infestation of them.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Yeah, actually!

In our apartment last year we had maggots falling out of the fan in our bathroom. It was the grossest thing. They would hang onto the ceiling and wiggle around or fall onto the floor and make it into other rooms of the house. They were tiny enough that they were kind of difficult to see, too... so it made for a paranoid week or so.

The running theory is that something died in the ceiling just off from the vent for the fan. Bad luck. Our landlord brought in an exterminator and sprayed something up there, which mostly solved the problem. The disgusting thing was that about a week and half later our place was full of big houseflies. I guess some of the maggots had found their way into a few dusty corners and managed to grow into flies.

Ugh. It was awful.

[MaxQue]

Moths in an university studio. Thankfully, it creeped university administration which acted swiftly.

[tik 🪀✨]

Oh yes. Several things.

The worst were the yellow jackets. Like in the OP, there were several thousand of them. They kept to themselves mostly in the beginning, but as winter came they began to get very.. tired. They started crawling around to random areas in the house to die. Twice they ended up in my bed while I slept and stung me. That was pretty awful, and we never called in an exterminator that I know of. Eventually, though, they all died. Then I got the unenviable task of vacuuming up literal piles of dead yellow jackets in closets.

Next worse were the genetically modified ladybugs. They were brought in to deal with other problem insects in the nearby corn fields. Somehow they eventually found their way into the house and made a certain area their mass grave. Ugh. The worst part about them was that when you crushed them they stank.

After that things get more normal. One year we had a lot of earwigs. Another we had ants. That house was cursed, I think. At least we never had cockroaches.

[Ebowed]

Fleas on at least three occasions, and German cockroaches once.

It's incredible how, after a visit from an exterminator, the regular cockroaches show up dead all over the exterior of the house for weeks after.  The regular ones here are big and somehow stay out of sight (and also completely unavoidable in most homes in Sydney's inner-west), and are preferable to the German cockroaches.

[Indy Texas]

I live on the Gulf Coast so...mosquitos. Mosquitos everywhere, all the time except for January and February.

[dead0man]

My mom's dog got fleas in the house when I was a teenager and it was a bitch to get them out of the basement carpet.  (the rest of the house we were able to rid them of, but for some reason the basement took a lot of work)

We got German roaches when I lived in a mobile home in Mississippi while in USAF tech school and they were basically impossible to remove entirely, a constant fight. Living in the south is a constant fight against all bugs really.  Hated it.

Carpenter ants will try and come in nearly every spring/early summer here, but between the traps that allow the ants to bring the disease back to the colony (we don't need these every year) and the three legged cat, it's never been a big deal.  Ants are nothing compared to roaches, palmetto bugs and the other strange giant bugs you get down south.

[dead0man]

oh...and the grossest infestation I've ever seen....

So they left a portapotty on the roof of the building I was working on in Atlanta.  Took the crane, left the toilet.  And it sat and sat.  I hadn't bee up there for a few weeks when one day it was the closest toilet when I needed to go.  Open the door and it was FULL....full of what?  MAGGOTS.....right to the rim/seat.  The smell....oh boy.

They never brought a crane back that I saw, but one day the portapotty was gone....I have no idea how they got rid of it.  Pushing it over the edge (5.5 story building) would have been great/horrible, so probably not like that.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Thankfully, the worst I remember in my house dealing with is ants, boxelder bugs, flies, etc.  My grandma was once bitten by a brown recluse spider, but those are technically arachnids, not insects. 

Every year, we constantly battle various stinging insects on the slide in our swimming pool (and occasionally the diving board.)  It seems to be a favorite nesting place for bees, hornets, wasps, yellow jackets, etc.  The overhang on our roof and our back deck are popular spots for them, too.

The most disgusting experience we've with pests was not with insects, but with mice.  I wasn't around when it happened, but I remember being told about it.  My gma once saw a live mouse swimming in our toilet.  She's also told me before about a house she lived in before with rats that were so big she thought they were rabbits.  We've also had animals push out ceiling tiles from running across them.