Nearly Burned Down the House

I used to live in Wichita, Kansas.  One summer, I was house sitting for my parents.  A wasp appeared out of nowhere in the TV room.  I HATE and am very afraid of any stinging insect. When I see this wasp flying around inside the house, I freaked out. I don't remember how, but somehow I managed to get rid of it.  Whew, big sigh of relief! Not so fast.  Before I knew it another & then another showed up.  Now I was really freaking out.  Then I noticed that they were coming into the TV room from the fireplace.  We only had a mesh screen on that fire place, not glass doors like we do today.  I decided they must have made a nest in the chimney & that I should build a fire in the fireplace to incinerate them or make them leave out of the top of the chimney. It took a lot of courage to put kindling & wood into the fireplace because I knew how close those nasty things were.  I light the fire and breathe another sigh of relief.  (You would think I would learn that breathing a sigh of relief is just a precursor to another problem, but .....) Guess what happened? Yes, the entire colony flew DOWN the chimney, escaping the flames & flying into the TV room.  If I was freaked out before, now I was nearly crazed.  I had no idea of what to do.  I went to the laundry room where we had various insecticides & picked the can that is designed to shoot a steady stream a long distance so that you can attack a nest you might see on the side of your house.  I started spraying the critters as they came through the mesh fire place screen.  Well, you can see what happened next.  I got too close to the flames with the insecticide & the fire started traveling towards me along the arc of the spray.  I stopped doing that right away.  I could have burned down the house or the can could have exploded in the my hand.  I retreated shutting the doors behind me.  I don't think I had the courage to go back into the room until the next day.
 I called an exterminator.  He was a very nice man.  I told him the situation, what I had done, & that I wanted him to do what he needed to do to make sure they were gone.  Get this, he says "Let's build a fire in the fireplace".  I was shocked, but said OK as long as I didn't have to be in the room when he lit another fire.  I left him in the room with the doors closed.  He started a fire & there were no signs of any more wasps.  I either had killed them all or the the smart ones flew out of the top of the chimney. 
I guess I should have been an exterminator.