There is a real-life morality play taking place in my back yard.
The dramatis personae are, one the side of goodness, my sweet honeybees.……….
And, in the role of the villain, yellow jackets.
Allow me to explain……….
About a week ago, I was puzzled and a bit alarmed at the paucity of bees in one of my hives. There were bees, yes, going in and out, but not nearly the mob that usually was there. A couple of days later, I saw one of my beloved little bees being viciously killed by a son-of-a-bitch pair of yellow jackets. They had turned him upside down and the two of them were mercilessly killing the little fellow.
On Saturday, I went to extract some honey from the hive, and when I removed the back panel, I was flabbergasted to see strangers in the house, as it were. Crawling up and down between the frames were intruders – – yellow jackets – – and I rushed inside to my computer to investigate the situation and try to figure out what to do.
Well, this is pretty common in nature, it turns out. You see, the honeybees………
- Spend all year working their little fuzzy asses off;
- They create the combs and nectar, and the queen lays countless thousand of eggs;
- And, to the the best of their ability, they guard the hive
The yellow jackets, on the other hand:
- Invade the hide, once they can overwhelm the defense;
- They eat the brood (AKA the bee eggs);
- They ultimately will kill every single bee;
- And, of course, steal every drop of honey for energy
The fuckers!
So I felt old-time America, coming in with the big guns to save democracy. I stood there with my long-range wasp spray, zapping any of the yellow jackets that came around (happily, they tend to fly low, so it made it easy to nuke them instead of the bees). I crushed – – I admit, joyously! – – any wasps that landed. And, as you’ll see in the live webcam below, I hung some yellow jacket traps very close to the hive.
The problem, of course, is that once the yellow jackets are in there, it’s like paradise, and they’re not that inclined to risk going into some weird-looking trap (although it did start catching them in the brief time I was still home).
Anyway, I hope that, with my help, the good guys will prevail. You know me well enough to know what a fallaciously dualistic view I have of the world, but…………it’s one of my charms.
