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Man Tries to Blow Up Wasp Nest with Fireworks, Destroys Garage Instead

In retrospect, a pest-infested garage may be better than no garage at all.
Photo by Shannon Millard/The Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP

On Monday, a man in Michigan went all "scorched earth" on a wasp infestation when he decided to use fireworks to get rid of a nest and accidentally burned his garage to the ground, MLive reports.

Mike Tingley reportedly stumbled across the dreaded hive in his garage a few days before the Fourth of July. Apparently, he came to the conclusion that because it was almost Independence Day, well, the most logical and patriotic move was to take out the bees with some fireworks.

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"The homeowner was doing something with a smoke bomb trying to get a bees nest out of the garage," local fire chief Bob Burdette later told MLive.

Tingley probably assumed the smoke bomb would subdue the wasps, since that's normally what beekeepers use smoke for—though most don't try to smoke bees out inside a room that's filled with other fireworks.

The smoke bomb allegedly ignited the rest of the fireworks inside the garage, and soon Tingley and his neighbors were treated to a little early Fourth of July display. Fireworks shot into the sky above the flaming garage as the fire department raced to extinguish the blaze.

Fire crews were able to contain the flames before they could spread, but the garage wasn't much more than a pile of ash by the time the fire was out.

"It is depressing losing a place where we had a lot of fun, but everyone is safe and that's the main thing," Tingley told MLive. Although the pests are likely long gone, a wasp-infested garage is probably better than no garage at all.