Defend the indefensible: Wasps

they have cool futuristic faces

one night i killed one flying around inside my window and then they started streaming out of an invisible crack above the window frame (they had nested in the wall). get 30 or 50 angry wasps flying around in your living room while you and your girlfriend are trying to kill them all and somehow cover their entrance at the same time, suddenly you don't feel quite so charitable to the evil little bastards. how neither of us got stung i'll never know.

here's another:
what do you call someone who gets out of the shower to pee?
a white anglo-saxon protestant

(fuck andy beat me to it!)

i am afraid of them

The wasps in my parents' garden eat their oak decking. It's really bizarre. I guess they take the wood away and use it for their nests?

Another time I was stung in my sleep, which meant wearing a bra that day was rather painful.

I felt extremely proud on sunday when I marched into the bathroom Chris had fled, and smashed the wasp.

I don't understand why people flap when wasps are buzzing around them. Mark's right, it'll only make them worse

I don't really get creepy-crawly fear, but yesterday I put on a pair of jeans that a huge spider and been making its home in for the night. I was sitting on the bed and looked down to see it crawling up at me over my crotch, like something out of the worst horror movie ever, and I yelped like a three-year old girl.

i hate wasps. one landed on my chicken at the weekend. i was upset.

They are evil buggers. No two ways. I hit one with the Radio Times yesterday but didn't kill it; it just hid behind my monitor and buzzed ominously. Fully expecting it to wreak revenge today. The only upside of wasps at work is that sometimes they fly into our weird industrial uplighters and BURN TO DEATH.

One stung me on the knee once. Considering I was on a nudist beach at the time I count myself lucky.

how do you recognise a German wasp?

http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/wasp-1.jpg

..(and how do you post images nowadays?)

those yellowjackets are one thing. big black evil bugs like these are not.

ihttp://www.gardensafari.net/pics/wespen/overige_wespen/aoplus_personatus_hs1_8362.jpg

ihttp://www.gardensafari.net/pics/wespen/overige_wespen/auplopus_carbonarius_hs2_3268.jpg

"Female tarantula hawk wasps hunt for tarantula burrows, or for male tarantulas out wandering. They capture (often following a dramatic battle), sting and paralyze the spider. Next they transport their prey to a specially prepared nest where a single egg is laid on the spider’s body, and the entrance is covered. The wasp larva, upon hatching, begins to consume the paralyzed spider while it is still alive, avoiding vital organs for as long as possible to keep it fresh."

Cis Friend Of The Wasps to thread.

HAHA colette has joined the club!

1. half a bottle of fanta.
2. open the lid and lay it down sideways.
3. wait for one of the greedy buggers to fly into it to try and drink fanta
4. laugh as it gets its wings and legs all wet and drowns
5. watch as 90 other wasps fly into the fanta to try and rescue their friend/get their share of fanta fun thinking their friend is merely bathing in the fanta jacuzzi.
6. collect a whole colony of dead wasps the next day.
7. refill sugary water and repeat.

xpostxpost

xpost shhhhhh Rob, Mother Nature doesn't know about the Patent Office.

well what do you expect if you would insist on FUCKING WASPS!??

and then they eat your veggies (AND MEAT!) themselves!!!

It's the circle of life.

Any hints??

While you are recovering from a bazillion wasp stings, go to the store and buy some insecticide.

I am starting to think the wasp-spray option is the way forward.

The hose thing wouldn't. Partly because I don't own one, and I don't fancy running back in through the door, and trying to pull a hose in through the kitchen window with a swarm of wasps behind me.

http://www.vespa-crabro.de/mandariania/mandarinia3.jpg

http://www.hornissenschutz.de/mandariania/mandarinia2.jpg

http://www.macewen.co.uk/images/hornet.jpg

...or the Asian Giant Hornet, alternately

Rather than consume their kills directly, the hornets chew them into a paste and feed them to their larvae (adult hornets being unable to digest solid protein). The hornet larvae, in return, produce a clear liquid which the adults consume.

When a hornet scout locates a Japanese honeybee hive and approaches the nest, the scout will emit specific pheromonal hunting signals. When the honeybees detect these pheromones, a hundred or so honeybees will gather near the entrance of the nest, apparently to draw the hornet further into the hive. As the hornet enters the nest, a large mob of about five hundred honeybees surround the hornet, completely covering it and preventing it from moving, and begin quickly vibrating their flight muscles. This has the effect of raising the temperature of the honeybee mass to 47 °C (117 °F). Though the honeybees can tolerate such a temperature, it is fatal to the intruder, which can handle a maximum temperature of about 45 °C (113 °F), and is effectively baked to death by the large mass of vibrating bees.

Except when they keep trying to dive into your beer, wasps rule.

I feel pretty stupid for doing it now..... because surely aftershave should come "after" the Gillette..... Tsk.

I love wasps! they are like little attack droids, there's something amazing about their shape, the curves on their wedge heads and the way their abdomen segments. They seem so gorgeously designed, in a way that fat fuzzy bees and blot-like flies aren't. And it's not like they sting without being aggravated, they're not mean-minded, just curious. (I think it halps that I'm pretty unaffected by isolated wasp stings)

what I think of as 'a wasp' == yellow-and-black stripes, thin delicately curved body, thinner than a bee, smaller than a hornet, bigger than a hoverfly (who looks like a wasp in order to scare you!).

my meager attempt at defending wasps. in italian, wasp = vespa.

Seriously though, TONS of the fuckers where I live.

North of Savanna, we swim in the Palisades
I come out wearing my brother's red hat
There on his shoulder my best friend is bit seven times
he runs washing his face in his hands
Oh, how I meant to tease him. Oh, how I meant no harm
Touching his back with my hand, I kiss him
I see the wasp on the length of my arm

Oh great sights upon this state! Hallelu-
Wonders bright, and rivers, lake. Hallelu-
Trail of Tears and Horseshoe Lake. Hallelu-
trusting things beyond mistake. Hallelu-

We were in love. We were in love.
Palisades! Palisades! I can wait. I can wait.

Lamb of God, we sound the horn.
Hallelujah!
To us your ghost is born.
Hallelu-

I can't explain the state that I'm in
The state of my heart,
he was my best friend
Into the car, from
the back seat
Oh admiration,
in falling asleep
All of my powers,
day after day; I can tell you,
we swaggered and swayed
Deep in the tower,
the Prairies below
I can tell you,
but telling gets old
Terrible sting, and terrible storm
I can tell you, the day we
were born. My friend is gone,
he ran away. I can tell you,
I love him each day
Though we have sparred,
wrestled and raged
I can tell you,
I love him each day
Terrible sting, terrible storm
I can tell you.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords!

http://www.kuleuven.ac.be/bio/ento/images/germanica_face.jpg

http://downloadsimpsons.com/files/insect_overlords.jpg

I'm glad they saw the funny side. I apologised for my French.

Hundreds of bees (or maybe wasps) wrapped tightly around the centre section of a metal street sign pole in Wardour St right now, just gone downstairs here at work to have a look, pretty freaky. Is it biblical? Can anyone explain?

they are swarming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarming_(honey_bee)

B-bomb in Wardour St.

Ow! Grrrrr.... I'm so paranoid about being stung and my friends find it hilarious because I'm one of these people that can't sit still if there's one in the vicinity. Always worried one's going to fly in my clothes or in my mouth. Anyway, I was minding my own business and got stung on the forearm. Thanks Wasp.

no fucking way. just went to soap my hands up in the bathroom and there's a wasp on the wall right next to the soap dispenser. nearly shat myself. good job i was in the bathroom. then i come straight on here to find a 'wasps' thread. freaky freaky.

xp: don't forget the thank-you note!

I got stung ON THE TIP OF MY TONGUE earlier this weekend. It was lying in wait for me at the bottom of a beer can.

Defense of wasps: without fig wasps to pollinate fig trees, there would be no figs.

I got stung on the inside of the lip by exactly the same "lying and waiting game". I've been stung loads, wasps and bees and I don't actually mind them, they have as much right to be here as we do. To be honest, I find the people who overreact in a pub garden and jump up from the table spilling drinks and screaming more annoying. If you get stung, put something cold on it asap, it goes away in a couple of minutes.

I try to conceal my hysteria when wasps hover around me. I was stung on a beach in Devon as a kid and ended up in accident & emergency struggling to breath. Now 30 years later, I know it's shit response but I can't help leaping to my feet if one of the little fuckers comes my way.

I hardly, if ever drink from cans.. so there's hope I won't get done that way. Stuff of nightmares!

Sometimes I get the feeling wasps must be proof of creation rather than evolution. Nothing so useless could have evolved. Someone must have been taking the piss.

Microwasp next to protozoans - it's smaller than some single-celled organisms (it's 50 um)! But it has eyes and ~7400 neurons whose nuclei are destroyed when it develops https://t.co/ZwqnvQL8zv pic.twitter.com/3DypRl6SNN

— Adam J Calhoun (@neuroecology) September 7, 2018

same

fucking hell!

I still feel shook from that moment a few years ago, when one minute I was wandering along an overgrown twisty countryside path listening to the DAB radio, and next me and the kid have a blanket of wasps on our legs stinging the bejesus out of us. I since learned that you shouldn't start killing the bastards until you have got some distance between you and the nest, because they send mobilise the troops signals.

Struggling to remember if I saw any wasps this summer.

Could well have been millions of microwasps kicking about of course.

don't make me post the picture of the giant japanese hornets

I watched a doc on them, and the heroes that hunt and destroy their nests. These beasts belong to the Carboniferous + need driving to extinction.

My mum had a nest in her garden this summer. I bought her one of them tennis racket looking insect electrocution devices. That usually shows them!

also people in the southern hemisphere often carry a syringe of adrenaline, in case they get stung by one of them. Get attacked by a swarm then fogerabartit!

giant japanese hornets that is.

someone once posted a horror vid on here of a singular giant japanese hornet casually destroying and murdering an entire bee colony without even breaking sweat.

Saw v few wasps this summer then the last week or so there have been shitloads around - also just an hour ago we had a braconid wasp at work

"Braconid wasps do not sting humans unless the humans abuse them.."

apparently these wasps have some kind of human's charter/code of ethics, but I still zap the bastards!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Cf_Aphidiinae_%2816779450492%29.jpg

"why I oughta..."

a thing that stresses country-born me is watching the town-raised panic on eg buses as a wasp or even a bee buzzes round them: chill out and don't flap! let them land -- you are not what they are looking for and they will soon go elsewhere! if you attack them they will probably attack back, yes, but if you let them be all will be well. 🎵 LET THEM BEE 🎶 frozen.gif

none of this applies if you are approaching their NEST obviously, then they will attack. also their nests are a nightmare of lovecrafto-trypophobic deep-dream terrors which must be expunged from human knowing -- possibly by filling their eggs with teenytiny fairywasps see above

after that carpet of wasps down the legs incident I completely get the jitters when they come anywhere near me now. I get some kind of strange physical response where I can almost feel the multiple stings down my arse and legs, all over again. I mean seriously.

^^^

lamer townie shit really, game needs to be upped!

wasps are nothing but a grim-n-gritty reboot of bees

honey? oh dear no
laying our eggs in a living host so that our grubs reduce it to a zombie husk? hell yes

Do wasp death throes involve them trying to fly and just sort of colliding with things and plummeting much? Noticed this with the odd wasp now and then in the house over the years.

you have to be careful, sometimes they look dead and then spring back to life like vengeful terminators, twice as pissed off with you.

here is a 2011 article on fairy wasps with an excellent emo title: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/30/how-fairy-wasps-cope-with-being-smaller-than-amoebas/#.W5Zx9dPwbvw

ans = THEY HAVE NO HEARTS

same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LmdmltW-XU

the case for the defence is going badly

say what u like about wasps, at least they're not litterers

I will heartily defend most of the animal kingdom. But wasps are actually tiny demons and so they should be exorcised with extreme prejudice instead of defended.

Like most animals that can hurt you will only hurt you because they feel threatened or because they're hungry for your flesh. Wasps will hurt you because fuck you that's why.

I have a few small paper wasp nests in my garage. I don't bother them and they don't bother me.

http://viz.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/11955_682874771773973_1090206415753205277_n.png

I believe you have to maintain a parallel empty cigar tube business in order to pull down that kind of cash.

Wasps are actually proof of the existence of God. Nothing so useless could have evolved; someone must have been taking the piss.

if you let them be all will be well

^ do not listen to this man

as a child in my grandma's back yard I followed this advice when a wasp landed on my face and stood dead still. bastard stung me in the lip

xp

Sometimes I get the feeling wasps must be proof of creation rather than evolution. Nothing so useless could have evolved. Someone must have been taking the piss.

― my father will guide me up the stairs to bed (anagram), Sunday, August 18, 2013 3:39 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they perform a valuable saprophitic service iirc

Wasps are actually proof of the existence of God. Nothing so useless could have evolved; someone must have been taking the piss.

― the word dog doesn't bark (anagram), Monday, September 10, 2018 6:58 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

On the contrary, it proves the arbitrary nature of the universe. Uselessness evolves all the time; just look at us humans.

Also, I will defend bastards like wasps to the teeth, fuck y'all. Wasps rule.

the case for the defence is going badly

― mark s

all I have to offer is that one species pollinates our fig trees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp#As_pollinators

tbh i remain very pro fairy wasps with their bizarro gazzarra-esque 7400 neurons ever since i found out about them for the very first time this morning!

i heard they taste good

the japanese ones i mean

You can't have https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Fig-Newtons-Stacked.jpg/307px-Fig-Newtons-Stacked.jpg without https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Ceratosolen_capensis_op_Ficus_sur%2C_Jan_Celliers_Park%2C_a.jpg/529px-Ceratosolen_capensis_op_Ficus_sur%2C_Jan_Celliers_Park%2C_a.jpg

"JAPANESE GIANT HORNETS, known in their native land as suzumebachi, are behemoths of their kind, some nearly two inches long and reportedly capable of stinging through leather. They often build their nests underground, in forests of cypress and cedar, and there, in autumn, hunters rouse the grown hornets, swatting them into jars of shochu, where they flail and drown. The clear liquor is left to steep for at least two years; it turns umber as venom and pheromones leak from the dead insects. Some who’ve drunk it liken the taste to whiskey, others to salt and ash. But the larvae and pupae, carefully tweezed out of disinterred nests, are eaten immediately, gently simmered with ginger so they stay creamy, or fried to a crisp."

http://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/t-magazine/eating-bugs-food-restaurant.html

the trick to not beinf afear'd by wasps is exposure. when I was a treeplanter I drove my shovel straight through a nest (by accident, obv) and despite making a break for it (and the fact that there was a torrential rainstorm) I still got stung about 7-8 times over as many seconds. Now I don't even flinch when they hover near me.

http://www.cicadamania.com/cicadas/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ckw.jpg

Cicada killers are a cool wasp. They are big and will divebomb you if you get close to their burrow, but they won't actually sting you. Very non-aggressive unless you are a cicada. Watched one battle a cicada before and it was a good evening's entertainment.

xp to how's life: haha, guilty as charged m'lud.

Came home from work last Thursday and was talking to my wife in the garden and felt something brush my neck. Moments late feel a stabbing pain on my upper back and realise a wasp has sneaked into my shirt, cue dancing around the garden, ripping my shirt off. Wife thought I'd either gone mad or was overcome by passion. Pain lasted until following morning, so in short destroy with extreme prejudice

Don’t figs eat wasps

My kids are scared to death of stinging insects, but even they recognize that cicada killing wasps are awesome. They are so huge and imposing and scary, but they only kill cicadas!

That sad, fuck yellowackets, they are such assholes. When I was in Middle School I think I stepped on a yellow jacket nest I got stung 17 times. Adding insult to injury, I freaked out so badly I ran through a thorn bush to get out of there, which messed me up even more.

When the wasps are about I get the table outside the pub to myself because everyone else is bothered by them. And they eat pests, some pollenisation, and gall ink (from the gall wasp) was a major source for inks.

I stepped on a yellowjacket nest too. I was in Boy Scouts practicing grid searches in the woods. I started cussing at the top of my lungs and one of the troop leaders got mad at me for using foul language. It took them a minute to realize that I was in trouble. Eventually got sent back to the camp nurse. I don't remember how many times I got stung, but it was probably in the upper teens or twenties.

I don’t understand why people get bees and wasps confused so often – honeybees, perhaps, but bumblebees are clearly an entirely different creature in size, shape and behaviour.

I recently spent a week at a cottage next to a hornets nest, and was terrified at first, but it turns out they are relatively polite - docile, even.

A local farmer insisted to us that it was possible to pick up a hornet with your hands, and they wouldn’t sting you. I mean, fuck that – obviously – but I did grow to enjoy them over the week (from a distance) and their nests are beautiful – lots of fractals, like a 90s rave poster.

(I adore bumblebees but their nests are just dirt piles, or whatever’s convenient - the inside of a deflated football for instance)

bees are the insect kingdom's fluffy dirtbags, hornets are fussy fancy lads

Man grabs handful of wasps with bare hands pic.twitter.com/mpdPURazRj

— viral viral (@xxlfunny1) September 24, 2018

he must have optimum non-radge wasp conditions there. I bet he wouldn't put his hand into a wasp's nest in deep country side. those wasps are all high!

literally got chased off a beach by wasps today. there were quite a few of them buzzing round us personally rather than our food, enough to make us want to move so we went about fifty yards down the beach but then it got even worse, four or five each buzzing round me and my wife and even the kids, really closely round our heads. there were dozens of other people on the beach, plenty of them eating and none of them seemed to be bothered. my wife basically ran off, I had to stay and pack up all our stuff. it was bloody weird.