Yellow Jackets According to Us

When I headed out with the usual suspects that day for our usual lunchtime run, I didn’t expect to end up looking at a coworker’s naked buns, but that’s the way things worked out in the end.  She was trotting down the Frog Pond trail twenty feet ahead of me when, all at once, she reached back and pulled down her running tights.  As I was trying to figure out what to make of that move, she suddenly accelerated away from me, flying down the trail at an inspiring pace, and reaching back with her hand and slapping at one startlingly-white cheek.  “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!” she said—though she repeated it more times than that.  Finally she came to a stop and turned to face me, indignantly pulling her tights back up.  “I got stung by a bee!” she said.

“It wasn’t a bee,” I said.  “It was a yellow jacket.”

Sometimes being Ranger Randy can almost get you smacked.

 

*          *          *          *

 

Well, the correction needed to be made, okay?  Too many people in this world don’t know the difference between a honey bee and a yellow jacket and it’s my job to enlighten them at all the wrong moments.   They are very different creatures.  They are both yellow and black and they both sting, but there the similarity ends.  A yellow jacket is not a bee, it’s a wasp, and by the way, you’re much more likely to get stung by one, and not just because their personality makes honey bees seem downright cuddly by comparison, but also because they don’t nest where bees do, way up in some tree cavity, conveniently out of the way.  Nope, they nest in shallow burrows right underfoot, just beneath the forest duff.  Walk too close to a nest, and one or two of them can get irate.   Step on it, and they attack in force.

BeeAndYellowJacket2
European Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)                                                 Yellow Jacket Wasp (Vespula vulgaris)
By Bob Peterson
[CC BY-SA 2.0]                                                                                  By Audrey [CC BY 2.0]

I have a relationship with yellow jackets (vespula vulgaris) that is just way more intimate than a cross-species relationship should be.  I’d estimate that I’ve been stung by those things over two hundred times, though I don’t think I have ever been stung on the butt, and the principle reason for that is that I was always wearing heavy work pants, and the principle reason for that is that, well…um…I used to be a logger.

People are surprised when I tell them that, because I’m now such an unabashed tree-hugger and militant environmentalist, but I sort of got here the long way around, and when I yell and wave my arms at the public hearings in defense of our forests, I actually know whereof I speak—the truth is that I have slain a lot of trees, and I have seen the timber industry propaganda from its back side.  I have a two-year degree in forestry, which is another word for logging, and I worked for two seasons in the woods before several things including the intellectual vacuum of small logging towns drove me on to other things.  For one summer while I was in college, I worked on a crew doing something the Forest Service calls tree thinning.  When you thin a stand of trees, you cut every small tree in about a twelve foot radius around the biggest and best looking one, to open up light and nutrients for the Chosen Ones so that they’ll shoot up and become lumber more quickly.  It’s a god-like job, deciding who lives and who dies.  You do this to an entire forest, finally leaving a bunch of perfectly-spaced trees sticking out of a five foot layer of slashed-up trunks and branches where the forest floor used to be.  And of course, you’re only supposed to spare the commercially valuable timber species.  So if, say, a tall, beautiful western black oak (Quercus kellogii) is within twelve feet of a pine seedling, you’re supposed to fell the oak.  (Black oaks are beautiful trees, and I didn’t follow directions well at times.)

In the course of all this, you step on pretty much every square foot of every acre of that forest, or if you don’t you drop a tree on it, so if there’s a yellow jacket nest anywhere, you will get mixed up with it.  And toward the fall, there are a lot of them.  Several per acre.  There are plenty of ways to get injured or killed when you spend your days surrounded by roaring chainsaws and falling trees, but this was by far the one that bedeviled us the most.

And I’ll tell you another difference between the two insects:  When a honey bee stings you, she leaves her stinger and a handful of abdominal organs imbedded in your flesh, and then quickly dies.  Yellow jackets don’t have barbed stingers, which means they can sting you repeatedly and fly away smiling and attack again tomorrow.  One time one of them danced down the side of my face, stinging me five or six times in a crescent running from my right ear all the way across my upper lip.  The little sucker got away clean, too, even though I risked life and limb by removing one hand from my chainsaw to slap at her.  Another time I walked up to a crew mate, and he was standing thirty feet away from his chainsaw just looking at it, where it was sitting there on the forest floor.  Puzzled, I looked at it with him, wondering what was up.  Then I noticed that the saw seemed to be oddly in motion.  Then I realized it was covered with yellow jackets.  He’d set it down on a nest.  He’d only gotten a couple of stings.  They were attacking the saw.  But that was going to have to change.  We contemplated the thing.

“Well…you can’t just leave it there,” I said.

“I know…” he said.  We looked at it some more.

“You gonna go get it?” I said.

“I thought you might.”

We looked at it some more.  “I already have a saw,” I said.

“Mm-hmm,” he said.

Finally he let out a rebel yell and charged in at full flight speed, snagged the saw with one gloved hand without even slowing down and disappeared whooping and hollering into the woods.  I stood looking after him.  He didn’t quiet down for some time.

They have marauding personalities.  They are inquisitive, opportunistic, tenacious and ravenous.  When they check you out they have a sinister way of feinting back and forth just above your skin, like a boxer about to throw a punch.  Even people who study wasps for a living call them “extraordinarily aggressive.”  Almost every other wasp in the world is strictly predatory and hardly ever comes into contact with us, but yellow jackets are very unusual in that they have a scavenging behavior on board, and the sense of curiosity that always accompanies that, so they mix it up with human beings all the time.  They get thick around picnic tables.  Wave one away and she’ll immediately return.  Swat her and she’ll get mad.  They’re well-respected in the woods, both by us and other insects.  Flys, moths, beetles and even other, non-stinging wasps mimic their markings protectively (it’s called Batesian mimicry), but the yellow jackets do have their own predators, including other wasps.  We once hooted and cheered like kids as we watched a yellow jacket and a bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata), which is a larger, black and white wasp, roll around on the stump that was our lunch table, locked in a predatory battle to the death.  The yellow jacket finally succumbed, and the bald-faced hornet flew away with her prize—right into a large, orb-shaped spider web twenty feet above us.  Nature in action.  A bad day for both of them.

2919baldf.w
Bald Faced Hornet (Dolichovespula maculata)
By Beatriz Moisset [GFDL]

Like bees, they have a potent venom but in a tiny quantity, and most people suffer no serious effects from a sting or three.  But if you’re allergic or  you get swarmed, you can quickly end up in anaphylaxic shock, which is a deadly condition in which your throat swells shut, among other things.  Everyone who works in the woods is asked whether they have an allergy, but of course not everyone knows whether they do or not, and besides, allergies can come and go.  There was a folk legend going around the Forest Service office I worked out of, about a foreman who was supervising a crew in the woods when a worker stepped where he shouldn’t have and picked up several stings.  The foreman asked if he was okay.  Yeah, the guy said.  The foreman asked if he was sure.  Yeah, no problem! he said.  The foreman looked at him.

Later the foreman couldn’t explain why he did this, but he grabbed the guy, heaved him into the pickup and peeled out for town.  By the time they got to the hospital he was comatose.  He’d had his life saved by a man willing to trust his instincts.

Well, that’s the story on yellow jacket wasps, but it’s not the whole story.  I wrote this article entirely from our perspective.  In the next post, I’ll tell the tale through their eyes, and I’ll take you inside a nest, and introduce you to the queen.

Stay tuned.

 

 

 
Copyright © 2013 Randy Fry

By |2017-05-24T00:03:07-05:00October 12th, 2013|Nature Essays|1 Comment
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Life, Death and Unbalanced Christians

“FTP, Bro’,” my brother Byron said to me over the phone in my motel room two nights ago in Santa Barbara.  The miles had been slow and disturbing on southbound Highway 101 on my way to my uncle Seab’s funeral, and I was headed for a badly needed shower when he called from Aunt Elleen’s place.  He needed some time with me bad, I could tell—he was in one of those family moods he gets into.  He was wondering about staying in my room with me instead of with our aunt and the gang, but I told him that though he was welcome, there was only one bed, and he decided to hang where he was.  We talked about the drive, and the memories.  We’ve both spent more childhood time on that highway that ran between the two families than I care to think about.  Joyful memories were flickering for me, of running through the woods in Santa Barbara with my cousins.  The extended families were huge, and there’s a beautiful cemetary down there that I feel like I grew up in.  I’m certainly one to remark on his mood—obviously I was in some sorry state myself.  I looked at the ceiling and pictured Byron’s face on the other end of the line.  “FTP,” I mused into the phone.  “Let’s see….F….T….”

“The last two words are ‘The Past,’” Byron said.

So now I’m back at home and sitting here in front of my laptop, and the whiskey is going down way too easy, and I can already tell that this will be one of those journal entries I don’t show to anyone at all.  But hell, that’s what journals are for—to allow you to ramble aimlessly to no one but yourself when you don’t have any answers.  So hey, I’m fine!  I’ve got a glass in my hand and a keyboard under my fingers, and there’s no problem in this world I can’t say something stupid about.

The redeeming quality about life is that at the end of it a bunch of people get together in a room and say nice things about you.  When you’re little and when you’re dead—that’s when people are nice to you.  The trouble with memorial services, though, is that they’re wasted on the living.  The only human being in history to manage to hear his own eulogy was Tom Sawyer.  Clever boy.  No wonder he ended up so famous.

So God sent Jesus down to experience this mortal existence for him, and Jesus came back with his forehead all scratched up and holes in his wrists and ankles, and he said to his dad, “Y’know what, this is a bitch!”  Or so Christian doctrine was described to Susan and I two years ago through a communal alcoholic fog at a bar on the Santa Cruz Wharf after our Monterey Bay kayak crossing.  The analysis came from an amazing personality who was throwing money and evangelism around the room in equally inspiring quantities.  It’s the first time I’ve been disinclined to take one of them on in debate, though Susan engaged him repeatedly.  But for me, the entertainment and the drinks were too good, and besides, he’d asserted that this life is a bitch, and some statements are simply unassailable.

I do love the profound things, though.  Life, love, death, political conventions, and unbalanced Christians.  I just don’t want any of them to get too close to me, that’s all.  From unbalanced Christians I’m protected by my atheism.  From political conventions I’m protected by the power switch on the television I don’t own.  Life, love and death have me by the balls.  Well, love does anyway.

I’ll probably figure all this out on my death bed half a second after I lose my power of speech.  The blinding light will dawn, and out will come a choking stammer of consonants and vowels, revelations reduced to refuse; a series of glottal double-clutches, here and there a hard C stumbling over a long O, a whining expellation of air, and finally a string of expletives reduced by a discreet god to a less offensive babble, as the lights go out.  “What did he say?” a roomful of dearly beloved kayakers will murmur.  “What were his last words?”

“….Coca-Cola,” someone will reverently intone.  “He said, ‘Coca-Cola.’”

Good reason to die without waking.  Drug overdose is good.  Remove the damned consciousness, then kill yourself.  Safer that way.  I’ve always had my doubts about jumping off a cliff, because I vividly remember the childhood experience of falling off the top bunk in my sleep and snapping to full awareness roughly halfway down.  That might have been the night I lost all respect for human consciousness.

Aw, screw this, I’m going to bed.

Carl Schaeffer is dead.  Passed away yesterday evening.  My old office mate.

Good night.

 

 

 
Copyright © 1996 Randy Fry
By |2017-05-24T00:03:09-05:00September 21st, 1996|Other Essays|Comments Off on Life, Death and Unbalanced Christians