Blog

Killer Bees!

May 28, 2006

Actually, they were just normal bees. Call me an alarmist. But killer or normal, upon attempting to grill food tonight we found two little wasp nests inside our grill:

Our choices were clear:

Declare the back yard a total loss. Watch more movies. Maybe read a book.
Spray poison into the grill, and get stung. Never feel comfortable using the now-poisoned grill ever again. Buy new grill.
Attempt to scrape the nests from the grill, and get stung.
Turn on the grill, raining down propane-y death on the wasps inside, and get stung.

Since I wasn't willing to surrender the back yard to the wasps, that meant that all roads let to getting stung. Which in a sense made the choice really easy--- with a level playing field sting-wise, one of the options stands out clearly as the best choice. Well, at least the most pyrotechnic choice.

To minimize the risk of getting stung in the process of incinerating my waspish enemies, I decided to create a home-made bee suit. This was, of course, an extremely stupid idea, and as such it needed to be thoroughly documented. My plan was basically to put on gloves, lots of clothes, and a jacket tucked into pants, but the weak point in my plan (okay, the weakest point in my plan) was the head area. What to do with the head...

Initial drafts of the design involved a Reynolds' Wrap window built around a sun hat, but the plastic wrap proved uncooperative. To put it mildly.

Well it turns out that in broad daylight you can see through a plastic trash bag pretty good, so I alarmed our neighbors by marching out into the june heat cloaked in winter jackets and garbage bags to smoke out our wasp adversaries.

Unfortunately there was no dramatic Flaming Wasp Attack, because of course the grill heated up far too slowly and they simply flew away. Anticlimactically, I didn't get stung, or even harassed particularly. I just threw the little nests over the fence. The end.

But you wanted to hear that I got stung, didn't you? Didn't you? For shame.

Posted by rus at 05:50 PM

Comments

This made me laugh so hard it brought tears to my eyes. I have had six margaritas but that is completely beside the point. Margaritas are my home made bee suit. You never feel a thing...

Posted by: Scott Johnston at May 28, 2006 11:35 PM

Were you here when there were thousands of bees living in Amy's wall? There were so many bees that when they were killed by poison it created a dead body smell that we couldn't live with. They had to rip out two panels of dry wall in her room in order to get the bees' bodies out. It was super gross.
She would laugh at your two bees.

Posted by: Darcy at May 30, 2006 01:32 PM

Not to mention the drunk bees that made it inside. Most of them I found after they died, but once I found one who was crawling along the floor because it couldn't fly.

But you win for best fashion choices during pest removal. Our bee person just had coveralls.

Posted by: Amy at May 31, 2006 12:26 PM