Wasp Wars

One of Anthroslug's recent posts made me ache in sympathy.  I'd missed the original post where he'd written about being bitten on the hand by a meat bee, and in the update he'd posted a picture of that very swollen hand.

We've had a few encounters with those things ourselves.  They've chased us away from our food at picnics in several different states, and one summer we had a nest of them in the backyard that was not nearly far enough maybe 30' from our back door.  We'd always heard them referred to as "ground bees" down south, but "meat bees" does describe them pretty well.  They're vicious little bastards when hungry or annoyed.

Initially, we took a live-and-let-live stance, but about the fifth time they chased me out of that half of the yard, we decided enough was enough.  The risk of one of the kids being badly stung was just too great.  Athos is allergic to wasps, so the job of emptying most of a can of wasp spray into the entrance hole fell to me.  We'd heard that wasps don't fly at night, so we planned our attack for well after dusk.  Folks, we had bad information.  Those flying f***ers WILL come after you in the dark!  

The good news is, I didn't trip or smack face-first into a tree in my headlong flight to safety. I'm sure the local ER staff would have found the story highly amusing if I had, though.  Stupid people tricks can make their day.  Like the adage says, It's only funny until someone gets hurt . . . and then it's hysterical.

It was time to escalate the chemical warfare.  Gasoline went down the hole next, EPA rules be damned.  Unfortunately we couldn't follow the gasoline with the application of a lighted match because of the 6' wooden fence panel the nest was situated almost-but-not-quite-underneath.  Good sense prevailed for once, and we decided neither the neighbors nor the fire department would be particularly happy with us if they had to help extinguish a bug BBQ gone awry.

Result?  Ground bees, 2; homeowners, 0.

So we broke down and called in a professional extermination service to get rid of them.  The guy they sent said something to the effect of "no problem, this will be easy", reassured me that he'd been stung before and it wasn't a big deal if it happened again, grabbed a mostly-empty small hand-pumped sprayer, and proceeded to hit the wasps with just enough insecticide to thoroughly piss them off.

I really did try to warn him.  But he, being The All-Knowing Pest-Control Professional, didn't see any reason to heed the advice of a mere homeowner....

The wasps boiled up out of the ground and came after him en masse.  Now, I've been stung before.  It's not my idea of a good time, quite frankly, so Ol' Paranoid here was standing well away, watching from a safe distance.  But I was still close enough to see that if the wasps weren't intending to remove their assailant from the gene pool, they were doing a damned good impression of it!

The first half-dozen or so stings seemed to make Mr. Pest Control realize the error of his ways.  He fled the yard, announced "I'll be back with more poison...", climbed into his truck and drove off.  We didn't see him again until over a week later, when he showed up with a pumper truck and a full-body bee suit.  Turns out the stings he'd received the first time had turned him into a Michelin man look-alike and he'd spent 4 or 5 days in the hospital on IV antibiotics and antihistamines.

He suited up, dragged the sprayer hose around to the back yard, rammed the nozzle down into the hole, and pumped damned near everything he had in the big insecticide tank into the nest, at pressure.  

There was no sign of insect activity anywhere near the nest, so a couple of days later we dug the thing up.  I wish we'd taken pictures.  The nest was much bigger than we'd ever imagined and so incredibly detailed we were almost (but not quite) sorry we'd had to destroy it.  But at least we knew for certain that our troublesome wasp colony was gone.

Most of the vegetation within a few feet of the nest was gone, too; it all turned brown and died in short order, leading me to wonder just what exactly was in the toxic brew saturating the ground there.  Some days I wonder if the next owners ever managed to get anything to grow there....