Bees!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A rant......

[Deep C]

You know, when I was a little kid we had good ol regular bees. Yeah the good ol fashioned bumble or the honey. Yeah we had wasps and bald faced hornets too. We even had a smattering of sand hornets with a few of the two inch death cicada killers tossed in for grins...
Then as I got a bit older, New Jersey started having a problem with gypsy moths and their young tent catepillars eating our trees. Now in that day pesticides worked but they were under the gun from the bunny boinking enviromentalists who were already starting to emerge from the slime they live under.
The state was under pressue to find a natural way to erradicate them. In their wisdom the decided to import a non native bee, the yellow jacket to keep the problem controlable. To a small degree it worked but the yellow jacketed demon from hell spread all over. Suddenly apple crops were under fire from them where the catepillars were in short supply.
I learned at an early age that those same bee bastards also loved spearing and baby bluefish which I always had a thourgh coating of each in the summer. I have been stung a zillion times over the years, each one pissing me off thoroughly.
I got up predawn as usual and first order of business is to take a leak... In my semi concious state I walked into the bathroom and was about to steady myself when... WHAM! I got lit up! I backed away as the little demonic shit drilled my heel and ... WHAM! I got the other foot lit upon the soft part between heel and toe!!!
Son of a... I flicked on the light and the damn place was crawlin with em!!... Being Deep involves a sense of fair play and I returned to the scene with a Bic Lighter and a can of Wd40 (Don't try this at home)...
I opened the gates of hell on the black and yellow soulless scumbags and as their little bodies twiched and writhed and smoked I could see more coming through a little hole. Wouldn't be prudent shooting flame into an old wood framed house so I scrambled for my token case of bee and hornet spray I happen to have...
I jammed the nozzle in the hole and commenced to a squirtin they wouldn't soon forget. The whole damn wall hummed. Sounded like an old propped aircraft in there. I looked out the window and saw some pouring out from behind a light by the door and raced to that scene and fired another can in there.
Its quelled down to a "zzzt zzzt zzzt" instead of the roar so I think I got em.
My rant isn't just about them though. What dopey ******* thought they could improve things with a non native species. Snakeheads, walking catfish, maleuca trees, australian pines, even the damn manatee which was imported to eat weeds has shown through history that that dog won't hunt... If anyone knows who that guy was or is let him know that he's subject to getting a topsider in the scuppers( that is if my feet stop swelling and I can get them back on)..

There I feel better already...

[Captain Michael Buffington]

Where did they come from? I went to Alpine Camp for Boys for a month every summer when I was 10 to 15 and that place crawled with them. We used to conduct all out war with them using the typical adolescent insect warfare device...GAS...We would fillup their little burrows with a gallon or so of unleaded and toss a match in. I would not suggest this technique on a woodframe house though

Mike

[Deep C]

I think Jersey imported them from out west like maybe California... Pretty sure it was the mid to late sixties when they did. We had burrow nests around the neighborhood that a buddy of mine and I would fill with gas and then light off with a firecracker...
Went to do that one day and the ground gave way under me and into the hive I went... I was black and yellow head to toe! Started running and stripping off my clothes and ran til I found a small pond to dive in. Basically a mud and algae bath more like. Should have seen the neighbor chick's face when I rose up from the mud more or less naked!

These ones got in behind that porch light and I'm guessing built a nest in the wall. Chewed their way into the bathroom for expansion I assume or maybe just to have a second exit like they often have...

[Dads Dream]

**Deep C

Yep, grew up in Jersey....remember in late July through like October and the little buggers made those ground nests that housed like 60 ka-trillion pissed off yellow jackets. I mean these hornets were on steroids and always in a bad mood- when we found one of course, it was game on. Plug that frickin hole with a 30 lb rock and watch them stack up outside...flying in formations that ran in circles around the hole....eventually one of my buddies would get too close for a looksee- making sure none of the ones underground were getting out and BAM!!!! he gets it.....then there's like another 20 that bury themselves in his ankle socks- or on the t-shirt- they're all a bunch of kami-kaze pilots.....doing what they do for the mother of all queens!

How about the big white-faced hornets nests that grew to be like 2-ft long- we'd lob big rocks from our driveway in attempts to tear into it- again....one of my dumbass friends or I would stay too long after a direct hit to the nest and BAM.....!!! get nailed!! and those bastards mean business- you were lumped up for a day

[Deep C]

I relayed about the ground nest I fell into but I watched one about as bad with a buddy who took a baseball bat to one of those big bald face hornet paper nests! I at lleast had mud to start soothing my hundred or so stings. I could hear that poor ******* screamin for the whole quarter mile run back to his house. Didn't see him again for a week!

Bees suck....

[Captain Michael Buffington]

Somebody getting drunk and shooting a hornets nest that was 20' away from the dove hunt beer epicenter. Noone spoke to Randall the rest of the hunt as I remember...

Mike

[Deep C]

Wasn't me....

But I used to snipe them from a distance with a pellet gun. Eventually laing enough out there to cut the nest right off the branch...

[captcl]

The importation of "non-indigenous" speices spreads out to all sorts of things Deep. Including people? Green Crabs(great tog bait) Zebra mussels etc., etc., even plants and here in Md. waterfowl (whistling swans). What did we do before these things were prevelent in the USA? The answer, IMO is, we did fine!

[floridadeckie]

Somebody getting drunk and shooting a hornets nest that was 20' away from the dove hunt beer epicenter. Noone spoke to Randall the rest of the hunt as I remember...

Mike

somehow I get the feeling I know exactly which randall you are talking about, and it sounds exactly like something he would do ON PURPOSE.

i f*cking hate bees and wasps. kill 'em every chance I get. now the big problem around my barn are ground wasps that dig holes in the aisleways in front of the horse stalls and those god-forsaken flying ants. with absolutely no provocation at all, those damn ants will drop down on you and start biting all over. the bite initially burns then it itches like holy hell for at least 6 hours. leaves a nice big red welt too

[Surfergirl]

HA!!!! It's funny that I read this today. I was plugging in a cord to do some detailing with the buffer today and got stung by something yellow... looked like a bee. it hurt for a while now it is itching... it didn't bother to bad, I either have a high tolerance for pain or I am just hardheaded... I just kept working.