I am always in a bit of awe when faced with the speed at which animals can build enormous structures. Last week I was working very near where Jae spotted this hornets’ nest yesterday morning, and saw neither bugs nor nest; within that time it had grown to nearly the size of a soccer ball. And while I’m generally pretty “live and let live” where insects and other creeping things are concerned, hornets are far too aggressive to allow inside the atrium! Unfortunately I did not have any of the “kill hornets from 6 m away” spray, but I used the flying insect spray judiciously and managed to clear them out without getting stung; a shovel then took care of the mostly-empty nest. I’d say there were already several dozen adults, and I didn’t try to count the larvae (though I saw dozens of sealed cells when the nest fell and broke open). But since I’ve always found the hymenoptera fascinating, especially in their construction of city-like nests, I just had to take a picture before I removed it. And as soon as I finish writing this I’m going to add “wasp spray” to my next grocery list, as a precaution against another swarm building a nest way up near the peak where I’d have had a devil of a time dealing with them otherwise.
Diary #684
August 8, 2023 by Maggie McNeill
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In a third-world country, I saw professional honey collectors using a strange but effective method of breaking a beehive. They would tie a bunch of wet hay to one end of a stick, and fire up the hay. But because the hay was wet, instead of burning, it’d only cause smoke. Then the honey collector would wave the smoky stick underneath the beehive. Bees did not like the smoke, so they’d fly away. And then the beehive would be broken. The same method was also used for breaking wasp nests.
I asked one honey collector why he would not just use some spray. These were after all wild bees, not domesticated ones in an apiary. The collector told me that there was some sort of religious recommendation against killing bees (it was a Muslim-majority country). Secondly, the honey was collected for human consumption, and any insecticide would contaminate it.