What do you do when your website is infested with yellowjackets?
With one misstep and my best friend's first loudly shouted obscenity, a swarm -- an absolute swarm -- of yellowjackets surrounded our persons and stung us to holy fuck. These aren't your ordinary stinging insects: They can sting, and keep stinging, and keep stinging without dropping their abdomens. With a somewhat exaggerated reputation for being vicious motherfuckers, there's no denying one thing in particular: Yellowjackets do not like having their nests disturbed, and unwittingly, that's what we did. And they were PISSED.
Several dozen stings and several dozen screams later, our mothers rescued us and, later in the day, bought us toys either as compensation or as a reward for setting the Guinness record for most yellowjacket stings without a subsequent hospital stay. Ever since then, the formerly amicable relationship I had with yellowjackets was tarnished.
A few weeks ago, I came across this device in Home Depot. I don't know. One second I was buying paint, and the next I found myself in an aisle featuring 20,000 ways to kill bugs. To be perfectly honest, due to the wording on the package, I thought I was buying a way not to kill yellowjackets, but to capture and release them to safer, not-near-me pastures. I thought it'd be really cool to be a hero in the yellowjacket community, because maybe then they'd strike my name from their record book of people who committed past nest-mangling crimes that deserved to be stung to death.
When I checked the product's official site, I quickly realized that this was in no way, shape or form a method to make good with my enemies. Using a replicated sex pheromone to draw in yellowjackets, the insects find themselves trapped in the yellow tube and eventually die of dehydration. There is no current proliferation of yellowjackets near my home, so I will not be testing this product. I see no reason to kill yellowjackets just to prove that I can. Or, at the very least, if I was going to kill yellowjackets just because I could, I'd do it all private-like and not advertise it on the Internet. Because I hate painting myself as a fucker.
Most ominous of the product's features listed on the website is its "clear plastic tube," which is only clear so that you can tally up your "yellowjacket body count." I know we cannot coexist with yellowjackets, but man, that's just spiteful.
Truth is, I love insects. All kinds. I don't read much in the way of fiction, but you can catch me with some kind of insect encyclopedia on a pretty much nightly basis. I've read enough about yellowjackets to know that they're only worth killing if there's a horde of them trying to kill you. In fact, the bastards are far more interested in taking out flies, caterpillars and other assholes who conspire to ruin your home garden.
Reading up on yellowjackets has also taught me why my old friends and I were almost destroyed by them: They build their nests in the soil, and it's a safe bet that one of us stepped right on top of one. Look, if I had a needle coming out of my ass and some alien giant starting stomping on my house, I'd use it, too.
On the other hand, I hate it when these bastards lurk too close to my soda cans when I'm soda canning outdoors. In such cases, I give you full permission to slay.
More Bugs on X-E: The Sectaurs Hyve - Insections - Kingdom of the Spiders.
Posted by Matt on 08/23/2006. E-mail me!
Chestnuts roasted by 
I never thought X-E would remind me of “Little House in the Big Woods.” I think I could die right now and be perfectly happy.