I was inside today, and the boys were in the frontyard, playing with their punching bag. As I wiped the kitchen counter, I could hear them shouting at each other.
J screamed, then screamed again. Then he screamed again, deafeningly loud, mortally loud, getting-tortured-by-Assad’s-troops loud.
I ran to the door as he was running inside.
“I’m hurt! I’m hurt!” he screamed. He clutched his wrists, his shoulder, his arm. Expecting bones to be broken, limbs to have been chopped off, I desperately looked at him. But I couldn’t see anything.
“A wasp! A wasp bit me!” he hollered.
“Ah,” I said. I reached and pulled his shirt over his head. I looked where he was pointing. I couldn’t see anything, but a moment later three raised red bumps popped up on his wrist, his arm, and his shoulder.
“There’s a wasp!” he said, pointing to the living room window.
Buzzing against the pane was a large wasp – black, with white stripes.
I had already looked this thing up last summer because my older son was terrified and fascinated by wasps. It was called a Bald-Faced Hornet. It hunted other wasps, killed them in epic wrestling matches, and brought the corpse back to feed to the wasp grubs. It was a fascinating scenario: the colourless hunter-killer, slaughtering its cousins and bringing the bodies back to the fat, white, blind monsters in the dark of the hive. These things had stung my six year-old son three times.
I killed it with a magazine, and then looked out the front window.
“Where’s your brother?” I said.
“I don’t know!”
A is terrified by wasps. While I was concerned for J, I was worried that A might have sprinted down to the US border by now. And J was beginning to calm down. I ran out back and yelled A’s name.
“I’m back here,” he called. He was around the block, at the entrance to the laneway. He came back to the rear of house.
“Where is the nest?” I said. There is ever only one reason you would be stung three times in quick succession. There must have been more than one of them, and they had been acting in self-defence. I would have to do the same thing.
“It’s right down by the steps.
I went downstairs and got out the Raid. I asked the boys to stand on the sidewalk while I looked at the steps.
It was a small nest, just underneath the mounted frame that holds the garden hose. I walked up to it very quickly and sprayed it, hard.
The buzzing began right away. The wasps arrived from afar, and some that had been inside came out. They flew in erratic circles, drunkenly, and then they began to fall. They wanted to fight the poison the same way they would fight an invading bear.
I sprayed it several more times, the chemical stink filling my nose, until the wall by the nest began to turn white with foam.
I got a tall bamboo stick that had been stood up on the side of the house since we had bought it. It was at least ten feet long. I poked that damn nest hard, and ripped it to shreds. It came apart easily, save for one small disk that was hard and dense. That fell to the ground, as heavy as a bathtub plug. Curious, I got a shovel and scooped it up. After I had finished looking at it, I called over the boys. “You’re in no danger,” I said. “But you should take a look at this.”
On the shovel was little hotel of wasp grubs- whitish blind things with tiny, questing brown pincers for mouths. They had somehow escaped the effects of the poison, and wriggled mightily, making crisp and disturbing little noises as they strained against their little paper cells. The cells in the middle were empty – the queen would have made those cells first, and then that first generation would have made the next layer, and then that generation would have made the next. There was likely a neat mathematical formula that could predict the outward growth of a wasp nest as each circular layer was built upon the one before. This was where the hunters delivered the dead wasps, the pieces of dead bird, bits of candy, nectar. Mammal infants were nursed with milk; these infants were nursed with scavenged flesh.
We stared at it for ten minutes before I had to go inside and make supper. Here are some pictures.
