February 6th, 2013 - Violently Stupid Wasps

A Wasp. Or Possibly a Bee.

There is a nest of wasps lurking beneath our balcony. They might be bees. Hard to say. What we do know for sure is that these wasps are violently stupid. Both Geo and myself have been stung now, and neither of us are happy about it. She was stung on the wrist and had to dig out the stinger. I had a wasp fall down the back of my shirt. Yeah. You can imagine how entertaining I found that.

The thing is, I was just sitting there, minding my own business, totally willing to peacefully coexist with this wasp. Out of nowhere, he suddenly notices me (thirty minutes into flying aimlessly around the balcony and knocking into things), and he divebombs me. I don’t even know if it was intentional.

It looked like he’d gotten lost, confused the gas pedal with the brakes, and just flew into me at full speed. At first he bounced off, stumbling around a bit like he was drunk, and then he somehow managed to fall down the back of my shirt, presumably because it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was about five minutes later that I realized this.

Good news: neither of us went into anaphylactic shock! No allergies for us, apparently. This is useful to know.

Better news: the wasps die after stinging you. And I’m not talking about a simple dropping-dead-out-of-the-sky kind of death. Oh no. They land on their backs and start freaking out, whipping around in little circles on the concrete while buzzing very loudly for a solid five minutes, around and around and around. It was quite a production. A touch melodramatic, if you ask me.

Now, when we come out in the mornings, there are little wasp carcasses strewn about all over the balcony, and armies of tiny ants dragging them away in disturbingly large pieces. The wasps seem to be ramming their little wasp bodies into stationary objects, such as the wall or the balcony door, and they do so with so much zeal that it kills them. Hence, the wasps being violently stupid. We don’t understand what’s wrong with them, but at the rate they’re killing themselves off, we may soon no longer have a wasp problem.

- LuckyStar