Unconventional acquaintances

Conventional wisdom holds that yellowjackets are nothing more than an often aggressive wasp that should be avoided whenever possible. And yet, just last month...

... I found myself making a whole bunch of new friends.

I think it was right around the beginning of October when I started noticing the yellowjackets combing through the compost pile. And it wasn't just a few either, there had to be at least 50 of them wandering/flying around the scraps during those first couple of days. This was an interesting development at the time, if only because they hadn't done this during the previous seven years that I've been here.

I'm not trying to make myself sound brave, or tough, when I say that I didn't have any reservations about continuing my almost daily ritual of taking things out to the pile, despite the presence of these supposedly dangerous little beings buzzing all around me. When it comes to animals and insects, I rarely hesitate to try and interact with them. I often think that I'm not smart enough to be cautious when such opportunities arise. Also, I have had seven years to notice that the yellowjackets around here aren't nearly as aggressive as the ones that I grew up around back in Oregon.

When I was a kid, yellowjackets were not something to trifle with, I can remember picnics being ruined by them aggressively going after any and all food, and of course, being an outdoorsy kid, I was stung on more than a few occasions. The two encounters with them that I remember the most both took place while we were leaving in Beaverton (I was 9 and 10 at the time). There are very few these days, but 30 years ago there was still a lot of untouched wooded areas in Beaverton, so much so that signs could still be found warning people of wild boars, while also promoting rewards to kill said wild boars (modern residents would probably find that very hard to believe). Anyway, we lived in an area that was surrounded by woods, with a fairly elaborate system of creeks snaking their way through those woods. Unrelated, but there was no shortage of beavers in those waterways at the time either. Those wooded areas were like a giant playground for most of the kids in the area, and many "adventures" were had, but I'll save those for another time. For today, I'll just mention the time that me and couple of friends were just wandering through the woods, and just so happened to, unbeknownst to us, get too close to an underground yellowjacket nest. We realized it soon enough though once those little buggers started pouring out of that hole with murder on their minds. Thankfully for us, we were only a couple of hundred feet from a wide section of deeper water, so after quickly realizing that we were in a bad way, we took off running for the water, being swarmed and stung all the way there. I could be misremembering, or romanticizing the past, but my memory tells me that we all reached the water at the same time, and all leaped in at the exact same time. The water was probably 8-10' in that spot, so we were more than adequately covered once we got in there. Amazingly, each of us only received a couple of stings (the speed of youth?), and were actually more concerned with having had to jump in the water than the stings, because even as young as we were, all the kids knew that that water wasn't the sort you should be swimming in, and certainly not the sort that you should accidently being swallowing (as one is wont to do when jumping into a body of water). I would end up in that dirty creek many times throughout those two years.

The other incident, which took place around the same time, but not in the woods, occurred when my friend Joey thought it would be a good idea to hit a piece of driftwood (located in front of someone else's house), which he knew had a yellowjacket nest inside, with a baseball bat. Now, everybody knew, including himself, that even by the age of 10, Joey was a tad off. Not like "slow in the head" off, more of a "crazy" off. I saw him do many a crazy-thing during the two years that we lived there, and this was certainly one of them. Despite his crazy, he was awfully fun to be around, you just always had to be on your toes, as you never knew what he was gonna do next. The one nice thing about his crazy was, is that it had a tell. It didn't take long for kids to notice this tell either, as it was the same thing every single time; he would get quiet, then when you would inevitably look over at him to see if he was paying attention, you'd notice him staring at you (or through you) with a sort of glazed over look, and that's when you knew something wild was about to happen. So it was on this particular day when we were walking home from a park that was where the kids usually played baseball. It was just me and him that day, well, me, him, and his baseball bat (he was one of the only kids with a bat). So, there we are walking, me slightly ahead of him, and I say something, he doesn't reply. I say something else, still no reply. I turn to see what's up, only to find that he had stopped in front of this piece of driftwood about 20-30' back. I could already see all of the yellowjackets coming and going from this piece of wood. Noting that Joey was standing right next to it, I asked him what he was doing, which was met with silence. Then I got the "look". He had been staring at the log, then turned to look at his bat for a few seconds before lifting his head to look at me with those oh-so familiar glazed over eyes. I know I said something, but I can't remember what as he lifted the bat to swing. Knowing what was about to happen, I took off like the devil hisself was on my heels, and within seconds, he was, in the form of many very pissed-off yellowjackets. Despite always being the fastest kid around, I couldn't outrun those suckers, and a couple of them got into my shirt and stung the hell out of my back. That would be my worst experience with bees/wasps, and of course the ironic part was that I found out a few days later that Joey hadn't received a single sting. And I wasn't surprised in the least, for not only was he crazy in the head, he seemed to always have crazy good luck. For those interested, I've got another good Joey story to tell one of these days that involves ding-dong ditch, and me not getting injured. Until then, let me get back to present-day, sort of...

I don't if it applies to all of Tennessee, or just around here, but I realized pretty quickly after moving here almost eight years ago now, that a lot of the insects are much more laid back than elsewhere. They may look scarier, because they're usually bigger than they were back in Oregon, but for the most part, if you're not trying to prevent them from doing what they're doing, they just don't care about you. And with me being outdoors so much, I greatly appreciate that about them.

My first real encounter with yellowjackets here came a couple of years ago, when a nearby hive started using one of the birdbaths for it's primary source of water. Since birdbaths need to be cleaned fairly regularly, and I couldn't let the wasps dissuade me from doing it, so I did what I always do, venture forth... and hope for the best! To my pleasant surprise, I didn't get stung! And so, for the rest of the summer, about every three days I'd go out amongst the buzzing masses, grab the bowl portion of the birdbath, dump it, wipe it out, fill it back up, replace the bowl on the pedestal, and the buzzers go right back to doing what they were doing. They weren't great conversationalists, but as is often the case, I enjoyed talking to them nonetheless. 

Fast forward to two summers ago, I was trimming some trees, and had to go onto the neighboring property to get the stuff that hanging down on that side. Once over there, I found a giant nest in an old gopher hole, yellowjackets again. And even though this was at the very tail-end of summer, when yellowjackets are supposedly the most aggressive, especially around their nests, these gals didn't give two shits about me standing right by their entrance while pruning. A couple of them landed on me a few times, but that was it. No stings, and no drama. 

Getting back to last month now...

Within just a few days of them arriving at the compost pile, they were already landing on me, and the plate of stuff that I put down on the ground while pulling things like banana peels apart (they break down quicker that way. They were especially drawn to my hands, or more specifically, the food remnants on my fingers. I found out early on that they liked apple and banana bits the most, so I started placing those in such a way that everyone could get some. 

Because I was enjoying their company so much, I decided to give them a treat one day. I had a tiny bit of strawberry jam that had been sitting in the fridge for a few months, and while I still could've probably ate it, I thought that they might enjoy it more, so...

The jam definitely went over well. Even got some ants, and a paper wasp trying to get in on the action.

It was a fun a couple of weeks there. Being the age that I am, I rarely think of taking a pictures in instances like these, I'm too busy living in the moment to stop and get photos. Also, when you're hands are covered in food scraps, and/or yellowjackets, it's a little hard to go get the phone and take some pictures. Besides what's already been shown, my only other shot didn't come out so well.

It was too bright out for me to see the screen, so I didn't know that the phone was focusing on the background, but even so, you can still sort of see the two cuties on my finger. If I remember correctly, this was the day that a couple of them were hanging out on my phone hand as I was trying to get this picture. It probably would've been better if someone else were there to take the photos. Despite their reputation, I found this group often acting more like honeybees than wasps, especially when it came to their gentleness. The only thing that I wasn't too keen on was when they wanted to land on my face -- but to be fair to them, I'm not a big fan of anything landing and/or crawling on my face.

 

I don't know if this was the home of my newfound friends or not, but I found this hive sort of nearby while we were getting to know each other. It was very active on the day I took this picture, but once again, nobody seemed to mind. Unfortunately, just one day later, I would come out to find it looking like this:

Somebody dug into the nest during the night, and completely decimated it. There was bits of comb everywhere.

There's only four things in these parts that will dig up a yellowjacket nest, bears, badgers, skunks, and armadillos. Despite how warm it still was at the time, I think it was too late in the year for a bear to have done it. I'm pretty that there was a badger living nearby earlier in the summer (I never saw it, but all signs pointed to badger hole), but it moved on long before this. We have a lot of skunks, but I just can't one doing this. That leaves armadillos, which weren't even around here 8 years ago, but over the last few years have continued to migrate east. The amount of dead ones that I've seen on nearby roads has increased dramatically in the last 2-3 years. And even though I still haven't seen a live one, this was the second summer in a row that the front yard has been messed up by somebody's digging, and according to images that I found online, it could've only been an armadillo doing it. They're considered to be an invasive species in the state, and after having read about them a quite a bit, I can see why folks aren't too happy about having them around.

There were some survivors after this attack, but all of the larva were taken, which effectively damned all of the adults who didn't die. I started putting some scraps nearby for those who were left, but other than that, there wasn't anything else that I could do for them.

The gals I had been socializing with often flew in from the opposite direction of the destroyed nest, so even though they're gone now (it's gotten butt cold in the last couple of days), I'm hoping that they were coming from another nest. If so, maybe they were able to tell next years crop about the awesome ape that they met before they died.

It's silly, I know, but I sure got attached these girls, and even though it's been less than a week since they stopped showing up, I really miss my yellowjacket friends.