About two weeks ago, in a rarely mowed section of my yard, I mowed over a nest of bees.
This has occured numerous times and the usual result is a severe reprisal on the part of the bees. I’ve been stung so many times I’ve lost count. But not this time. In fact, not only did these bees not attack me but they didn’t even appear excited. This lack of violence encouraged me to examine them a bit closer.
Today I took some pictures hoping somone could help identify them.
Could they be…honey bees? Whatever they are, they’re the coolest little dudettes I’ve ever seen.
I should add that I sat in a virtual cloud of these things while taking the pictures and not once did I hear them buzz in anger or fear.
From this picture you may think it’s a yellow jacket. It isn’t.
Those look like wasps, to me, not bees at all. I’m no entemologist, but I’ve never met a bee who lived underground, either. Wasps do, but those wasps sting and are fairly aggressive.
Yep, definitely some sort of yellow jacket. Out here they tend to live in hollow trees, but I believe sometimes underground too. Many bees, especially some kinds of bumblebees, live in holes in the ground.
Question: When the critters stung you before, did they leave their stingers in you (you’d know, because you would have to scrape and/or pull them out), or did they just zap you and go their merry way? If the former, bees. If the latter, wasps/hornets/yellowjackets.
Perhaps the difference in their attitude is indeed the temperature. I advise against repeating your experiment when it warms up.
Either way, don’t plan on getting any honey out of them.
So what I have then is a calmer, smaller version of yellow jacket.
The ones that got me in the past were indeed yellow jackets, not bees. Except they were much larger. Nearly twice the size of these.
These pictures were taken on the sunny side of the yard where it was quite warm both on mowing day and yesterday. I guess I need to decide whether to let the hive continue. Who knows, next year they could be mean.
Yep…definitely yellow jackets. Hereabouts they live in the ground and in embankments, and they can get EXTREMELY territorial. I was attacked a couple of years ago when all I had done was walk past the nest on my way to my car, and my dog was attacked last year a good five feet from a different nest. Different sub-species seem to differ in how territorial they are, but the ones here are dangerous enough that we can’t really tolerate a nest in close proximity to the house.
I think the aggressiveness of yellow jackets in the midwest is related to the temperature at night.
While your days may have been nice, have the evening temps been down in the 50s? I had a nest move into an old hay bale in our back yard one fall - days were in the upper 70s, but nights were much cooler. The yellowjackets were so calm my wife kept thinking they were bees…but they weren’t. Needless to say, but they don’t live there anymore…
They are everywhere here in east TN. I ran across a nest while mowing the yard last saturday, and I went back afterward to give them a big drink of Sevin and water, and they chased me away. I think I have 6 or 7 of nasty little stings that itch and burn like crazy.
They are indeed territorial, and like hornets, they’ll chase you around if you rub them the wrong way!
They generally tend to be aggressive, but cooler temps keep their activety down. It is also the time of year where they are beginning to die off, and that also tends to make them a little grumpy. I have been stung too many times by these guys… it really hurts, I can tell you.
The pest control guy we get out to eliminate our yellow jacket nests gave me one helpful bit of advice: If you’re being pursued by yellow jackets, take off your clothes as soon as you’re far enough out of range to be able to do so. They’re very scent-driven, and when they’re attacking, they shed a pheremone that incites others to attack (and that tells them exactly where you are). If you can pull off your shirt as you’re running away, often they’ll concentrate on that (since it will have the pheremone on it), giving you time to get well away from them.
Sometimes, I swear, they’re just looking for a fight. When my daughter was six, she was just sitting on our porch when one landed on her bare leg (she was nowhere near a nest). She stayed very still, as we’d taught her, but the darned thing stung her anyway. The one that started the swarm that got me had just landed on my wrist…again, I held very still, but he nailed me anyway, and that got the swarm going. My husband refers to them as the “Hell’s Angels of the insect world.” They make any attempt to eat out of doors absolute hell during the late summer and early autumn.
I had a yellowjacket nest in my compost bin this summer. It was nice and warm and dry - I wasn’t keeping it moist enough. So I went out with a can of wasp spray and a long rake. First I set up a couple of yellowjacket traps in the area, then I stood well back and tipped over the compost bin with the rake and sprayed them. Later my husband went out to spray them again, and he didn’t think and wore a t-shirt and shorts. The yellowjackets were not amused. He got stung 5 times. The next day I went out and carefully dumped Sevin all over the pile. After about 3 days we picked up the mess.
I think I’ll quit trying to do my own composting. It just doesn’t rain enough during the summer to keep the pile wet and I never think of dragging the hose clear back to that corner of the house. I went out after rebuilding the pile and poured some compost starter on it, which cost $5.99 for a little box, and I though, why I am I spending $5.99 and taking all this time when I can spend $4.99 on a bag of ready to use compost from the store?
Maybe for the same reason we are…so we don’t end up putting useful vegetable and fruit parings, eggshells, used paper towels and tea bags in the trash.
You know, if you don’t want to have to water it (and I admit, I’m always forgetting to do that myself), it will still eventually rot down to compost…it just takes longer. You also really don’t need that compost starter stuff…a couple of handfuls of dry dog food (cheapest stuff you can find) will do the trick if you’re in a hurry, but otherwise you can just relax and let stuff rot at its own pace.
Has it been a bad yellow jacket season in Spokane so far? I remember when I was a kid we rarely saw yellow jackets in the city, unless there was a lot of sugary stuff around (we always had trouble with yellow jackets hanging around the soda taps and sno-cone syrup in the popcorn wagons at Riverfront Park) but nowadays, when I visit my parents, it seems that you can’t sit outside for 10 minutes without the local hornets coming out to see what’s going on.
