Nature’s revenge
 |
| Oh yea, innocent looking bastard, isn't it? |
You may recall, if you have not managed to repress the
painful memory of reading it, that I wrote an entry to this blog on the topic
of accidentally destroying some native bird eggs titled “Death on the
Farm”. It was my confession and apology
to nature that we had unintentionally destroyed two sets of bird eggs. These were sad events.
I don’t ever intentionally kill animals, fish, or insects
unless they pose a threat to me or family.
Even when I find a scorpion in the house, I don’t dispatch it. Instead I scoop it up and remove it to the
outdoors. That seems like the proper
thing to do.
I have done the very same
thing to venomous snakes. We’ve found a
Coral Snake and a couple of Copperheads in the yard this year. My wife, the Fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler,
assisted me in capturing the Copperhead in an Igloo Cooler (Attention Igloo
Corp. Endorsements available.) and toted
it to the other side of the dam where we tossed it into the brush. This was perhaps a 100 yards from the
house. The next day we found an
identical Copperhead in the same area where we caught the first one. We repeated the Igloo treatment. I do not know if this second snake was the
mate of the first, or it was the same snake who just came back for its stuff. But when we got rid of the second one we did
not see any more.
The point of this is that we go out of our way to avoid
harming wildlife, with the exception to those that are in the Hymenoptera order
of insects. Playing nice with snakes and
scorpions is one thing, but we have had a lot of wasp nests being built around
the house, and I hate wasps. They can
fly, their sting really hurts, and they can sting multiple times without dying
(unlike bees). I found one wasp nest
built under the redwood table right next to the pool. I sprayed it with poison to kill them. Another nest was under the seat of the bench
swing. I sprayed it too, along with a
few more that were in places where we could very easily have a bad encounter
with them.
So I guess it should not surprise me that I was brutally and viciously attacked by members of that same insect family while I was working in
the yard today. We had a pine tree,
about the size of a decent telephone pole, get uprooted during a wind storm and
fall into the lake. It is about one half
submerged in the water, and the pine needles on it have turned a sickly
brown. It is very depressing to see that
dead tree laying in the lake.
I decided that today was a good day to cut it up into
manageable pieces and drag it out of the lake with the tractor. I cut it into three sections and was pulling
the first to the burn pile that we use when we hear that the atmosphere is low
on CO2. We had not burned anything for
months, so a lot had piled up. I drug
the first section of the tree to the pile.
I jumped off the tractor and was in the process of unhooking the chain
that was wrapped around the log when I felt a nasty sting on my arm.
Then I felt other stings and saw that I had disturbed a nest
of bees that had taken up residence in the burn pile. I could not tell how many bees were
attacking me, and I did not wait to count them.
I made a “bee line” to the house, running and swatting away the bees as
they chased me from their nest. I ran
past the pool but did not jump in. I had
a lot of mud on my shoes and did not want to get the pool dirty.
I was beating them off with my gimme cap as I ran from the
scene. This was not just any gimme
cap. This was my prized cap from an
Oilfield Trade Show that had an embossed drawing of a pump jack on it with the
words “Save our Strippers”. This
referenced Stripper wells, which are low producing oil wells which the United
States has hundreds of thousands of. If
these wells are shut in due to Government regulations, the oil stops flowing to
the wells and they become non-producers.
The organization giving out the caps was fighting the Gov’t regs. that
were forcing the wells to be shut in.
But of course, since the cap refers to “strippers” and we are men, then
naturally the message might be thought to refer to another kind of
stripper. I love double entendres. However, I digress.
As I said, I was beating off the bees as I dashed into the
house. I made it to the bathroom and
started stripping (there’s that word again) off my shirt to uncover the stings. My wife dabbed the Sting-Eze on to the
growing welts. I had perhaps two dozen
stings, but the only one that really bothered me was one right below my right
eye. It still had the stinger in it and
was swelling up. I got tweezers and
pulled out the stinger on that one and a couple on my arm. I suppose that some people would be concerned
that this many bee stings could cause me to go into Afflectic shock. But not me.
I was not concerned about that. I
don’t know or care about the actor Ben Afflect.
Therefore nothing he could do would shock me.
I am recovering now after taking a soothing shower. This is a good reason to relax the rest of
the day, watch College Football, and nap.
The bees were perhaps getting revenge for their fellow Hymenoptera, but
they did me a favor. I now have an
excuse to be lazy. I should relax. I may
even watch a movie. Perhaps I will watch
a Ben Afflect movie and decide he actually is a good actor. That would
be shocking.
