September 4, 2011 Another Kind of Bee Man

[BigV]

I got a slightly alarmed call from my girlfriend a couple weeks ago saying that there was a swarm of wasps trapping her in the house. She'd been stung once and now could not get in or out of her house from the front door. I came over and found these guys. They'd colonized the grill cover. We could see them flying down to the bottom and disappearing. I didn't know what I was facing at the time, so I stole this picture. I setup the camera and put it down on the ground and shot upward. These guards were not amused.

I would up capturing the whole colony in a bag (which I rebagged several times) and I'm just going to starve them. By the time summer's over, I'll be able to take the grill cover back out of the bags, clean off the bodies of these yellowjackets and cover the grill again.

For the record, in my capture and cleanup I was stung once. It didn't hurt very much, a little, but the next day the itching was fierce. I still have a red sore on the back of my hand ten days later.