Nature's revenge

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.