as days pass by

Scott Andrew LePera (welcome back, Scott!) rants about yellowjackets, so, this being a truly noble subject, I thought I’d join in. Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m terrified of wasps. Not just that I dislike them, or that they irritate me, or that I don’t like them flying around. Terrified. When I see wasps I run away. I once spent a whole lunch break hiding in my car because one chased me. I hate them, the horrible little stripey bundles of malevolence. Scott points out, quite accurately, that they don’t sting to defend the hive, or if they feel threatened; they just sting. For fun. Because there’s nothing good on telly. To watch your face. And they have this mind-numbing droning buzz, which doesn’t sound scary until you hear it around your face. Especially when everyone around you says something like, “Don’t swat at it, you’ll make it angry.” It’s already angry. Wasps are born angry, and they never get any happier. And they serve no purpose other than to sting and be nasty; bees pollinate flowers and make honey and all that. What do wasps do? Sting people. That’s it. They’re like some evil equivalent of the Jewish tzaddikim, the 36 righteous people on who the weight of the world rests; wasps embody evil in all its forms and are the representatives of the Prince of Pain on earth. You might think that this is an overstatement, but you’d be wrong. Someone I know once, in an over-reaction typical of him, threatened to tie me down to the floor in mid-summer and pour honey on my face. Just the thought of this scares me so much that it leaves me breathless. I woke up sweating in more than one nightmare, hearing the menacing drone, feeling them crawling over my eyelids. Rentokil were called out, a couple of years ago, to a house where it was believed that there was a wasp nest in the attic. When they arrived, they found that the nest was ten feet long and probably contained about half a million wasps, or some other massively unimaginable figure of wasps in one place. They evacutated the house for two days. Personally, I’d have burned the house to the ground, although that might have just left you with a pile of ash and half a million very hot and very very angry wasps, which wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. The BBC had a news article about a man who poured insecticide into a wasp nest the size of a car while suspended from a helicopter, which is an act of either colossal bravery or abject stupidity. I don’t know if Scott will actually perform his planned guerrilla raid on their nest, but I hope he does. Every wasp that dies makes the world a slightly better place. ——-