As if the outcome about Rolo the Dog wasn’t enough, I have another quick anecdote.
A week ago, I did a post called Nest of Vipers, which was about the real-life morality play going on in which yellow jackets were viciously killing my honeybees and taking over their hive. I have a bee-cam and, during my week away, watched helplessly as the bastards swarmed in and raided the place, taking what was not theirs, and murdering my beloved bees. I was heartsick all week over the situation, and I had already plotted my ideas about how to go completely medieval on those creatures including, but not limited to, fire.
I started off early in the morning, immediately after my return home, blasting the hell out of these bastards with a chemical spray which, for whatever reason, is illegal in California (I smuggled it in from North Carolina by way of my checked baggage). I zapped ’em, one by one, and they approached the hive, and, yes, I said some colorful things to them as I killed them off. Arrghhhhhhhhh!
There were no bees coming in or out, however. I was too late. I was so sad, looking at the hive, which normally was (literally) a beehive of activity but was now a ghost town (you can see some of the corpses of the dead yellow jackets in one of the traps I set remotely). My bees had been conquered.
And yet…………when I walked to the other side of my back yard, where a barely-used hive was sitting, what did I see?
WHOO HOO! They just moved in across the lawn! Huzzah! I was so happy my little guys were, for the most part, all right. The “dead” hive, if abandoned until next spring, I’ll simply re-establish with a fresh colony. But it makes my heart sing that, in the end, the yellow jackets lost the war after winning every battle.
