Squash a bug?

Bee in my car while I'm driving. That one gets my attention.

One time I was out in a large fairway of a golf course about to hit my ball. Bee came out there and stung me. No trees or flowers, nothing, anywhere near.

Quote: rxwine

Bee in my car while I'm driving. That one gets my attention.

Bike helmets get hot, especially when stopped and you have all that hot air rising from the engine and the road. Standard procedure is to crack the shield when you stop, reshut it when you go.

Sometimes you go first. And with one hand doing the throttle and the other needed for the clutch, the shield remains up for a bit. Not a lot; it's down enough to prevent taking a pebble to the eye, but it doesn't stop everything.

Once, as I was trouncing on it in full acceleration mode, a bee got sucked up, splattered on my face, and got stuck right at the corner of my eye. You ever been stung right in the corner of your eye? Repeatedly?! And no matter what you cannot do anything about it, because to do so would mean crashing?

I don't mind bees and don't entirely hate being stung. But attention? That one got mine =p

Quote: Face

Bike helmets get hot, especially when stopped and you have all that hot air rising from the engine and the road. Standard procedure is to crack the shield when you stop, reshut it when you go.

Sometimes you go first. And with one hand doing the throttle and the other needed for the clutch, the shield remains up for a bit. Not a lot; it's down enough to prevent taking a pebble to the eye, but it doesn't stop everything.

Once, as I was trouncing on it in full acceleration mode, a bee got sucked up, splattered on my face, and got stuck right at the corner of my eye. You ever been stung right in the corner of your eye? Repeatedly?! And no matter what you cannot do anything about it, because to do so would mean crashing?

I don't mind bees and don't entirely hate being stung. But attention? That one got mine =p

I meant to include bees. I'm very careful not to bother them, in the house or in the flowers. Open season on wasps, though.

Quote: beachbumbabs

Open season on wasps, though.

Shouldn't be unless causing actual danger. They are predators for most of the summer on nasty insects so actually help you out. We had yellow jacket nest last year in the white pine tree off our deck about 25 feet from ground and only maybe 12 feet away. They generally minded their own business except for the regular recon of our wine glasses.

And I know, unusual because they normally nest in the ground...

On of my questions for God is why are there yellow jackets? We had an infestation in the rectory one summer it took me getting stung three times in the living room before I realized the problem. Huge nest of them in the walls, it was crazy when we killed them it sounded like the train was coming through the walls.

Then the next summer we got an infestation of honey bees above the entrance of the Church. When we found out they were honey bees and they hadn't bothered anyone the exterminator tried to open the wall and get the queen. He was unsuccessful, but the bees left anyway. It looked like they were going to make lots of honey some people thought we should have kept them there and collected the honey. I do think honey bees are amazing however I admit I have little love for the rest of insect-kind and have no qualms about killing the little buggers.

Yellow jackets can't hold a candle to bald faced hornets





I'm in the woods all the time, but I only noticed these recently. And suddenly I had two nests in my trees at home, just like the one pictured above. Sort of a fat, swollen apostrophe.

They caught my attention obviously because they were almost all black, with white markings instead of any yellow whatsoever. And their sting? My god. I'd rather be stung by a bee than bit by a deer fly, as a bee sting just feels like a cigarette burn for a moment before it's gone. But these things... I took one to the top of the head last year and I damn near passed out. I mean legit lightheaded, sweating, dizzy. It hurt SO BAD.

So the nest needed to go, right? Just wait until night, get a bucket, put the nest in the bucket, clip the branch. Then take the nest out in the woods, easy peasy. Well, night did not calm them down whatsoever. As soon as the flashlight hit the lone soldier guarding the entrance, he perked up, ran inside, and came back with buddies. In 30 seconds, it went from a quiet nest with a lone soldier to a swarm just like in the pic. I had my truck facing it with headlights on and they dive bombed it repeatedly, eventually swarming all over the thing. And this was like 3am.

So I had to break out the poison. I get that blasting foam spray, which blows the nest apart and gobs them all up in foam. Nope. The blast doesn't even peel the outer layer of the nest. The come scrambling out of the main hole in the bottom and the emergency hole on top. I pick off every one before totally burying the entire nest in a coat of foam, letting it soak in, and burying it again.

I come out the next day to no difference whatsoever. About 30 corpses dot the lawn, the others just as perky as ever all swarmed around their home. Unreal.

I eventually had to soak it one more time for no other reason than it's highly flammable and had to torch it out of the tree.

I'd take a battalion of mud daubers over just one squad of bald faced hornets. They're one of the few things that make me nervous in my neck of the woods.

Quote: Face

As soon as the flashlight hit the lone soldier guarding the entrance, he perked up, ran inside, and came back with buddies.

What you didn't hear.

Lone soldier hornet: "This is Sparta! Tonight we dine in Hell! Hurrah!"

You should be parked for a quick get away. Beware of bees engulfing air intakes.

Beekeepers always dress so as to exclude entry via clothing. Socks cover pantlegs, tight shirts, no folds for a bee to be trapped in and signal for help because when help arrives its deadly.

Look at the honey bee versus hornet battle. Hornets have armor and the honey bees is defenseless. If a hornet finds a honey bee nest the honey bees no that if one hornet escapes, they will all die. So immediately the honey bees start fanning their wings to cook the hornet to death. The honeybees die by the dozens but eventually the hornet gets cooked at a temperature only 3 degrees lower than what the honeybees will die at. Honeybees will mob one or more hornets, but a whole swarm will be a losing battle. Bees fight to the death. Its no different if they are fighting you or something else. And their kairomones signal other bees to come and attack anything thats moving or strange in the environment. That can include a vibrating water pump or a person.

Some people can die from one drop of venom ... they won't ever make it to an ER. They carry an epinephrine pen and either are able to use it in time or they die within twenty minutes.

Some people are attractants to Jack Jumper ants or something like that... dozens of people can walk along a sidewalk under a tree and nothing happens but suddenly one of them is a "magnet" for dozens of jack jumper ants coming in for the kill. Lots of research going on for this stuff, the best is at Hobart University in Hobart, Tasmania.

Quote:

Justin Schmidt is an entomologist, and has accordingly been stung by a lot of bugs. So he invented something called the Schmidt sting pain index (named after some guy called Schmidt, apparently), which ranks the pain of insect stings from one to four. Down at one is something like the fire ant, which is so named for a reason, while up at four is the bullet ant, which is so called for a very, very good reason.

Joining the bullet ant at four is a critter that lives right here in the southwestern US: the tarantula hawk. It’s actually a kind of solitary wasp with a sting whose resulting pain only lasts three minutes, but it’s so fiercely electric that it could only be described as totally unacceptable. “There are some vivid descriptions of people getting stung by these things,” says invertebrate biologist Ben Hutchins of Texas Parks and Wildlife, “and their recommendation—and this was actually in a peer-reviewed journal—was to just lie down and start screaming, because few if any people could maintain verbal and physical coordination after getting stung by one of these things. You’re likely to just run off and hurt yourself. So just lie down and start yelling.”

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/absurd-creature-of-the-week-tarantula-hawk/

good stories here guys.

Face, glad I seem to have no bald faced hornets around here. In fact hornets and wasps generally of the mild-mannered variety, a nest has to be in a really bad place to worry about at all. The exception is the yellow jacket; the hole in the ground that got their interest the last time around I saw had opened up again a couple of weeks ago. So I took care of that right away. In fact I have decided that if you have an old stump rotting away, better be looking for holes opening up with the decaying root system. You just don't want holes opening up in your yard I think.

I had something shiny in my hand when I last got stung by a yellow jacket. Rxwine, that makes me wonder if you got stung by a yellow jacket instead of a bee. That is definitely one of their moves, getting ticked at something shiny near their nest.