If I read one more blog entry from a gardener stating how much they hate wasps and hornets I’m going to have a hissy fit. No. I think I’ll have it right now.
Wasps and hornets have the unfortunate characteristic that the only thing God gave them to defend themselves with was a stinger. What they are doing is protecting their extremely vulnerable brood. The brood is completely immobile, totally soft, and pathetically easy to kill. The adults know it, and this is one of the things that makes them so quick on the trigger. If you are being chased by wasps and /or hornets, then you have entered the area of the fragile brood and they are wired to protect it. Come to think of it, it is pretty easy to kill the adults too. We only outweigh them about a thousand times or so.
I’ve been stung by them all, folks, and it isn’t that bad, really. Well, unless you have an allergy to their venom. Then I realize it can be life threatening. People whose lives are threatened by such things generally have an epipen on them or nearby at all times though. The rest of us should lighten up. Frankly, I’ve had my arm broken too, and sprained my ankles, slammed my fingers in doors and drawers. Wasp stings are less painful and last quite a bit less time to boot. Hey, try being in a car wreck someday and then decide which you would prefer: that or a sting?
I am sick and tired of reading vilifications of the invaluable predators and pollinators that wasps and hornets are. I have sat quietly on my teak bench on numerous occasions and watched the red wasp scraping wood fibers off it when she was busy building her nest. Why teak is so much superior as building material as opposed to the thousands of board feet of oak and hickory in the area is beyond me. Maybe wasps like exotic flavors. But the fact is, she was happy to be collecting her house material right next to me and never made a move to aggress against me, returning several times during the time I was resting and enjoying my afternoon brew on that bench to collect more fiber.
I am also sick and tired of reading about how horribel and scary spiders are. People need to stop watching horror flicks and reading scary stories if they can’t distinguish fiction from reality. No, I am not fond of brown recluse spiders or the other ones that can make us very sick, and I don’t allow them in my house. Let’s be real here: spiders do not hunt us or seek us out to bite us. They bite us when we are so unobservant as to put our foot in a shoe they decided to sleep in, or start to crush them when we roll over in bed on top of them.
I am one hell of a lot more frightened of the nervous system poisons in Raid Yard Guard or the other chemicals ignorant humans spew all over creation in their attempts to murder every insect and arachnid in their vicinity than I am of a 1/2″ spider. Or for that matter, a 6″ spider. Spiders kill far more bugs than they eat, and I am very happy when I go into my kitchen and count the number of gnats and fruit flies my night-light spider has executed. Similarly, when I find an orb weaver in my vegetable garden, I tell her “You go girl!” and celebrate, because I know I have somebody helping me eat the damned beetles. The wolf spider that lives in the pinecone basket in my living room goes out at night and hunts for the millipedes and wood roaches that come in through the outlets and pipe holes looking for water, and I’m happy to be her landlady. Last winter she actually had babies. I make an effort not to step on her during her hunting forays when I head to the potty at night.
Finally, I am also sick to death of people who hate snakes. So you like mice and beetles and cockroaches so much that you wish one of their major predators was dead?
Oh, this just makes me tired. Get over it already, people. There is an ecosystem out there. Try to live in it, understand it and stop being so damned afraid of every little creepy crawly thing. If you’d stop screaming and running you might discover how incredibly beautiful they and their works are.
Your hatred and fear of your greatest allies in your determination to grow flowers and vegetables makes no sense.
Okay. I’m still not well, and standing on this soap box screaming and waving my arms has exhausted me. I’ll stop now. Besides. I sadly realize that it probably has changed no one’s attitude in the slightest.
Too bad. Maybe we’ll all be satisfied when every living creature on the planet, including us, is dead.
I was agreeing with you, until the snakes …
Seriously, I do agree. I’m trying to teach my kids to be calm and respectful around insect and garden life and not to run screaming. It seems to be working. Having grown up in an African garden, where the wildlife ran to monkeys, eagles and deer, I regard our European bees and spiders as smaller but equally interesting versions of the big fauna. I hope my attitude is rubbing off.
Charlotte, at least you are aware of the value of all members of the ecosystem. And you don’t have to love things to be respectful. Plus, didn’t you come from a part of the world where there are some rather nasty customers in the snake department? That would make anyone cautious and respectful.
I love spiders, with appropriate respect, and I’ve always wanted to have a black snake under my porch, and I’m not even that much of a gardener.
My step-mother, who’s only six months younger than I am, keeps snakes. I have a couple photos of her somewhere with them looping around her arms like the Minoan Goddess, except she has no bosoms, alas.
I won’t let people kill a spider in my house and I’ve had people freak out over the matter. But you know, I don’t have bigtime problems with other bugs, and I haven’t used anything fancier than boric acid baits anywhere on my property for years. I do have fat birds. FAT.
There you go. Fat birds, fat spiders, no bugs. It’s not rocket science!
I used to keep snakes, when I was in high school, and one of my best friends in CA was a reptile fancier. In addition to her Burmese Python, she had fox snakes, several lizards of various species, and some really cool frogs (which of course are not reptiles).
Oh, but you have changed my mind! I was with you all the way till you mentioned snakes. I am scared to death of them. But I guess, thinking about it here and being real, the snake won’t bother us any more than the wasp or hornet and such if we don’t bother it. It’s just the sight of a snake that is so utterly startling to me. But after listening to you on your makeshift soapbox, feeling ill all the while, I shall try my very best to get over it. I love spiderwebs, look for them all the time to photograph. They don’t scare me. The wasps never seem to sting me or the bees. Love to watch them. I’m working on the snake thing. I promise.
Brenda
Thanks, Brenda. I really appreciate your input because I have so often felt that my rants were just a way for me to vent. Now you made me feel like I was effective.
Good luck with the snake thing, it isn’t that hard to overcome once you start thinking along those lines. What I have found is that the first step is to decide, then start learning who is who so that when you see a snake you think “garter snake” or “What kind of snake is that?” rather than “AACK! SNAKE!” with all the side-connotations of cobras and rattlesnakes.
I’m with you 100%. I cannot understand why people make such a fuss – usually its ignorance about the creature they are decrying, as well as a dose of “Well, girls are supposed to be scared of these things so I’d better make a fuss or I won’t be feminine” – which is precisely the kind of arrant nonsense that we both abhor.
Amen, sister. That and running with your arms flapping.
Agree 100%. I like the snakes in Western Washington, they are not poisonous. For the rest, I have a healthy respect, and try to keep out of their way. Spiders are escorted outside. Although they usually don’t show up in my aerie. Although if they get rid of fruit flies, I might have to import one.
I’m not sure they get rid of them but they certainly put a dent in them. My “night-light” spider is a very tiny dark brown spider with the sort of conformation that the black widow breeds have. She is all of 1/8 inch long, lives behind the shade of the night light and builds her tiny web there and captures all the little bugs that are attracted to the light at night. I have one that lives behind the soap dish in my bathroom where there is also a night light. They are hard workers and have never demanded a pay raise.
I’m very fond of snakes and spiders, myself. I’ve reacted badly to stings in the past, so I tend to be a little wary of stingery things, but I don’t have any moral objection to them.
I do, however, dislike slugs pretty intensely, but then, I just dislike cold slimy things in general. I dislike tofu for much the same reason.
I’m not crazy about tofu either, and not because it is cold and slimy but because it is boring and tasteless.
I’ll bet you don’t go around posting rants about how much you hate wasps either.
Oh come on guys, tofu isn’t cold and slimy any more than flank steak is: that is if you let it be.
http://zeusiswatching.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/please-just-give-it-another-chance/
As far as hissy fits go, this was a good one. Feeling all better now?
I don’t hate any of the critters you mentioned, does that earn me a brownie point or two? And, although I’m not fond of them, I don’t hate snails either. I just eat them for lunch with some garlic bread and loads of garlicky butter. 
We used to contemplate doing just that to the myriads of snails that lived in the ice plant in California.
You already have dozens of brownie points, Yolanda! Your darling cutie Tara and your beautiful potager and the fact that you come here to visit and make comments have already garnered you quite a few. I’ll add these to the tab.
People just have such irrational reactions. I’m usually very tolerant of insects and spiders in the house, and it’s always me who gets out the jar and the stiff paper to catch and release them outside. I don’t want them in my house, but I’m not about to kill them.
However, even I, the “brave” and considerate one, can have instinctive, irrational reactions. The other day I had gone outside briefly and then returned inside. I was talking to my hubby and saw movement below my chin. I looked down and there was a ginormous spider in my hair. I yelled and without thinking tried to smack it out of my hair. Then hubby said, “It’s still there,” and I noticed that it was a beautiful garden spider. I let it hang out in my hair while I calmly walked outside and persuaded it into the grass.
I know wasps are beneficial, but I really wish they weren’t so aggressive. We had a nest of yellowjackets by our basement steps in NY and several people were stung. One time a yellowjacket got me on both inner thighs! I can tell you, it was hard not to consider getting rid of them after that. They didn’t come back there the next year, thankfully.
Now, I’m going to go all lecturer on you for just a second. Technically, yellow jackets are not wasps, but belong to the tribe of hornets. All hornets are extremely territorial and aggressive, and they love meats and sugars so if you are in their area you should be extremely careful when eating jelly sandwiches or drinking sugary beverages. I have been stung on the lip by a yellow jacket who did not care to be drunk along with the juice.
Wasps are those insects with the incredibly slender waists and proportionately much longer wings. By and large, they are much less aggressive than the hornet tribe is, and many of them have no stings at all. If you want a real treat, look up the ichneumon wasp and you will start to really love wasps. They are stingless, the long thing on their abdomens is their ovipositor. A nice site to start at is here: http://www.cirrusimage.com/hymenoptera_ichneumonidae.htm THis next one is really cool, the author has a series of pictures of the wasp drilling her ovipositor into the log. Very, very cool: http://www.cirrusimage.com/hymenoptera_ichneumon_megarhyssa_fem.htm
Funny. I have found spiders in my hair also! When we were processing basil into pesto the other day, I must have rescued 8 or 10 every confused spiders who could not understand why they suddenly were in my kitchen sink rather than out in the garden where all the bugs were.
I was frantically looking for the one and only hornet picture I ever took: dearly wanted to see what you do when in a “hissy fit”.
Needn’t have bothered as you did your hissing anyway:-)
I’ve never gotten a hornet picture; not yet anyway. All I have is the hornet paper.
When I have a hissy fit, I generally raise my voice and get all sarcastic and pompous and tetchious.
Nope, you haven’t changed my attitude. Which is a good thing because I happen to agree with you.
But nobody will ever convince me to be rational about cockroaches. The only good cockroach is a dead one. Dead, dead, dead.
Well. I’m not even going to try to convince anyone that cockroaches deserve anything other than being squashed as soon as possible. I’m only too pleased when I find evidence that the wolf spider has successfully found, killed and eaten one!
I agree with you… didn’t you hear me in the audience yelling “Amen!” while you delivered your fire and brimstone from the pulpit?
And I LOVE those awesome photos of the snake skin, and all of the spiders. I did have to relocate one particular spider this spring (only because it was impossible to go down the front stairs without destroying his web every day) but normally I just work around them. And there’s almost always a wolf spider back in “Coco’s Corner,” who I forget about until I manage to freak him out so thoroughly that he jumps at me in desperation! *grin*
Actually Kim, I think I did hear a few “Amens” out there. . .
I have had to relocate spiders for the same reason. Last year there was one who was determined to build her web across the steps to the front door every night because the light shining through the front door was such a temptation to the bugs. I finally convinced her that she could just as easily have a web from the eaves to the front of the front planter and avoid the stairs. My clients did not like walking through her web even when she wasn’t in it. Go figure.