WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER
Visiting my friend on her farm with three horses out in the middle of nowhere, the first thing that happened was that I got stung on the ankle by a little wasp. The fucker was clinging to my right sock and jabbed me as I was walking up the stairs. I shouted like a madman and everyone came running. Then my foot swelled up.
I located the hive. It was underground, yellow jackets constantly swarming in groups of two and three from a hole in the lawn right near the front door. I could have just avoided them for the weekend but my friend is allergic so this was a real problem. She went to her other farm for five days and I stayed to housesit with her brats, I mean cats.
Anyhoo, I set out to destroy the hive. My first dumb move was thinking I could spray a can of Raid down there. It did nothing but piss them off and the next day they were coming and going as they pleased, two and three at a time. So I did what any blue blooded American would do. I watched some YouTube videos. I waited until dusk and poured an entire container of dish washing soap down there and then I stuck the hose in and poured water in there for twenty minutes and sealed it up with a sink strainer so nobody could escape. Bwahahahaha. The next day I did it again, pouring soapy water through the silver circle in the grass because I was still seeing wasps hovering around. Finally, the wasps were becoming more scarce, so I waited until the middle of the night and got the shovel out of the shed and choking on a little flashlight held between my teeth, I attempted to dig up the hive to completely destroy it. I couldn’t find it among all the tree roots but I dug a good sized hole over it and filled that in with hard soil.
Over the course of the next few days, dudes in black and yellow striped prison garb came sauntering back, two and three at a time, crawling around the pile of dirt in search of the missing hole. It made them easy targets for the spray, of which I used eight cans and three different brands, some of which was organic, lemon and mint flavored leaving tasty snacks for the birds, although I did have to learn how to aim. I must have killed 30 wasps. Sometimes I’d get it and it would make a heroic attempt to fly away only to drop dead right out of the air in the distance. Sometimes I got it so good you could almost hear it cry out as it suddenly convulsed and rolled around and took to the fetal position. Mostly I missed completely, cursing and stomping my foot as the sneaky devil buzzed away. But where were they coming from? Had I failed to destroy the nest? Were they coming out of some other hole? Or were these stragglers that weren’t in there yet when I nuked the hive?
I’ve decided on the latter since this morning I slammed the screen door shut and the sun was blazing on the mound and I saw not one single drone. Okay. It was an act of genocide. But they fucking started it.