We met a yellow jacket as an unwelcome uninvited guest
at our Avignon picnic. We would soon
meet a number of its German cousins.
Many people call yellow jackets “bees,” but they’re not: they’re a wasp
(genus Vespula). They are about the same size as a honeybee,
but with yellow and black bands instead of the honeybee’s brown and black,
and, unlike a honeybee, they feed meat to their larvae, while the adults feed
on fruit, flower nectar and other sweet liquids. While they hunt and kill a lot of noxious
insects, they can make picnicking unpleasant and turn hummingbird feeders into
wasp feeders.
They start out with one queen in the spring, but by
late summer a colony can have thousands of members, in nests built in holes,
nooks or crannies of various sorts. At
St. Mary’s they made a nest inside the long, narrow metal lock mechanism of one
of the doors, going in and out through the keyhole. Last year, the man repairing our telephone
line told us that they were coming and going through a hole in our house
siding, below the phone box. It turned
out that they had a nest in the basement.
After the Orkin man had done his job, dozens of dead yellow jackets
littered our basement floor.
Last spring, I decided to replace the old, decrepit
plastic compost bin by our back door, and put up a new one alongside,
transferring most of the compost. I didn’t
get around to taking down the old one. A
mistake. Just before leaving for Europe,
I noticed that yellow jackets were entering and leaving the old bin. Uh-oh.
When we came back, it was clear that there was a colony inside there. I considered destroying the nest, but I wasn’t
sure I could do it myself, and calling an exterminator would cost money and
lead to having to get rid of contaminated compost.
By last week, activity around the bin had
intensified. There were so many flights
in and out that you would think that they’d need some sort of air traffic
control. For the moment, though, I kept
a policy of peaceful coexistence. That ended
Saturday afternoon, when, entering the garage after putting some compost in the
new bin, I was stung twice. Yesterday
(Monday) morning, the first thing I did was call Orkin. A few hours later, the exterminator arrived,
I signed the yellow jackets’ death warrant and he went to work. It didn’t take long before I was signing their
death certificate, while he showed me the sting on his arm. In California, he said, Orkin gives bee suits
to its operatives. Not here.
I went onto our back porch and watched the old compost
bin through the screen. It was
surrounded by a cloud of yellow jackets, wildly careening back and forth, at
full speed, like tiny flying chickens with their heads chopped off. As the day went on, this cloud got smaller
and smaller. One could not avoid feeling
distress at such distress in one’s fellow creatures, or at very least
unease. They had lost their mother and
sisters, and their whole society was destroyed.
Their world had collapsed and they themselves were doomed.
This morning, though, in the now-absolute stillness, I
couldn’t bring myself to wish them not-dead.
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