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Wasps (and other petty vilenesses)

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18:00 / 15.12.04

Ganesh! I just read your post, don't swat at and kill the wasps! Try and make peace with them, they're not bad creatures.

Oh yeah, and I always help wasps and bees back outside if they come into the room. Best thing I've found is : get a magazine, hold the edge of it and put the spine of it against the window, so that the opposite direction, away from the open window your guiding it to, is blocked from it. Then, slowly move the magazine, and the wasp/bee, towards the open part of the window and eventually they get to the window and fly off. (I love the feeling of helping a wasp/bee back outside into freedom)

This can get tricky, so if the wasp is flying around quite madly, (they sometimes get mad at repeatedly hitting against the window, so watch it if you try this, I had one that was really, really pissed off once.) and you have a curtain, use the full curtain instead of a little magazine, leaving it no option but to fly/move in the direction that you are moving the curtain.

(and if doing this scares the shit out of you, then it's a good chance to get rid of a fear and at the same time make freinds with a new species of insect)

That is not ugly or vile! Look at it's face, that's not menacing at all.

18:02 / 15.12.04

Maggots.

I know they are useful to rid decomposing matter off the face of the planet, but then they turn into something so utterly useless as a fly. Seems a fly's only purpose is to just make more maggots. So, I would have to say that flies are pretty damn vile too, since they make maggots (which disgust me) and are fruitless otherwise, no pun intended.

What purpose could a wasp possibly have?

18:04 / 15.12.04

Sometimes, the stinging bastards can get at you by stealth.

My mum, who is allergic to bees, became seriously ill when she ate a piece of toast containing the honey-preserved corpse of a bee. How one manages not to notice an actual bee in one's honey - let alone spread it on one's toast - I may never know, but it put me off honey for life, I tell you.

So... be careful out there, honey-lovers. It's a minefield.

18:08 / 15.12.04

Oh, and Mosquitoes! Those little bastards and their maddening little buzzing noise that alway, always manages to find it's way directly to your eardrums and then proceeds to bang away on it like a high-frequency djembe.

Irritating little fuckers.

18:10 / 15.12.04

Slugs. *shivers*

Especially after the rain.

18:13 / 15.12.04

Slugs are fine, man... It's leeches that really give me the howling fantods.

I swear, that scene in the swamp in Stand By Me scarred my young mind.

Cheap. Easy. Cruel.

18:23 / 15.12.04

Both leeches and maggots are being put to valid medical use these days. It is pretty creepy, but I can't deny the help that they give.

18:27 / 15.12.04

Eugh! Slugs.

I don't know why, but I hate them. Snails are fine but I don't like slugs at all. However, I don't hate them enough to pour salt on them. I did that one and I have to say it looks like a really, really horrible way to die. The way they writhe from side to side with bits melting off them.

18:43 / 15.12.04

Slugs came to Earth on a meteor fragment and have no place in our natural world. They are probably writing a big slimy report on Earthlings to send back to their extraterrestrial masters. But they're taking longer than was planned because of the lack of opposable thumbs. Or even hands, come to that.

But snails aren't so bad. They're the Tom and Barbara Good of the gastropod world, sufficient unto themselves with their little houses on their back. Sweet. Still a bit slimy though.

18:54 / 15.12.04

Food poisoning and gastro illness in general. This is particularly personal at the moment.

You too? They're targeting us. I wonder why....

I don't like paper wasps, but mud daubers are OK. Not nearly so territorial/prone to sting for no good reason.

18:57 / 15.12.04

I've seen one of those extraterrestrial masters. He hid behind my old rabbit's hutch and he was about a foot long, swear to god. He used to come out at night with all his brethren in anticipation of me having to lock my rabbit in for the night. Hundreds of them teeming all over the place with me trying to step between them in the dark (sometimes slipping on them), often having to pry them off the door and lock with sticks, exposing the sickly white slimy underbelly and.... Ohhh God.

I need to lie down.

19:29 / 15.12.04

Of course, all these pale in comparison to the true paragon of evil in the animal kingdom:

19:46 / 15.12.04

You foul fiend! Badgers are neither slimy nor slithering.

Anyway, do you mean to tip Stoatie over the edge?

20:26 / 15.12.04

UC Santa Cruz does not approve of your slug antipathy.

22:00 / 15.12.04

I think one of the main factors in this is that I never waff at them, even if one comes buzzing and virtually lands on my face. (which happened not long ago) This makes them mad, and that's why people mostly get stung.

Which is all very well until, as I pointed out earlier, one of the fuckers tries to EAT you! What then, huh? Me, I grabbed her when she was chewing on my lower lip. The only wasp I have ever killed.

22:19 / 15.12.04

Which is all very well until, as I pointed out earlier, one of the fuckers tries to EAT you! What then, huh?

Then I think I'd have to waff.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

22:30 / 15.12.04

Wasps arrrgh arrgh ARRRRGH HATE. As a moderator, I may have to raise the matter of posting offensive close-up horrible wasp images--in thread and with no warning whatsoever!--in the Policy. Wasps = bad. End of.

Slugs also = badverybad. Back in the North London flat, our bath used to drain out of a plastic pipe and into an old sink gully in the back garden. Slugs used to climb up it at night. You'd potter into the bathroom for a nighttime widdle, wurrghh I'm not up really I'm totally still asleep mmm cozy bed mmmm wurrghh, ARGHH SLUG ON FOOT SLUG ON FOOT SLUG ON FOOOOOT!

And then you'd have to spend the hours between 3am and going to work scrubbing slug mash from between your toes with a pumice stone and some Vortex. Yuuuck.

22:34 / 15.12.04

I just read your post, don't swat at and kill the wasps! Try and make peace with them, they're not bad creatures.

No, they're not "bad"; they're wholly, indescribably evil. The whole "make peace" thing is nothing more than wasp propaganda, as flimsily see-through as the ridiculous 'stand still and they won't sting you' bollocks. As I said, it's the wasps you can't see that cause you the most hassle; you tend to have little or no chance to "make friends" with the little fuckers before they sting you on whatever limb you've unknowingly extended in their direction.

And that photo: are you taking the piss? That's a miniature devil, a shot of pure malice in a yellow-and-black package.

22:53 / 15.12.04

I'm with the anti-cockroach contingent, but I do believe the urban myth that, when we humans have blown up the earth with nuclear weapons and made it unfit for all life forms, cockroaches will live on quite merrily with the sulpher based life at the bottom of the ocean. And I say more power to them! We don't deserve this fab planet, you know.

Wasps I also handle with a glass and a piece of paper. Glass over wasp against window or wall, slide paper (card-weight is best) over the mouth of the glass, and take it outside.
Just point it away from yourself and the wasp will happly fly away as soon as you pull aside the paper. I've never been stung that way. But my child was stung from sitting on a a wasp--couldn't see it crawling in the folds of the patio furniture, poor luv. I did hate THAT wasp. But at least it was crushed to death by her skinny 8-year old leg!

(For evidence of a malevolent deity, I give you, ummmm, your typical Wal-Mart on a Saturday morning anytime this month.)

00:20 / 16.12.04

What? you actually visit that malignant empire of anti-capitalist oligarchy? Sheesh. That's almost as bad as actually buying Microsoft products.

Wait a sec, I've been guilty of both, but I am migrating away from the diabolical MS in the tens and dozens lately.

00:48 / 16.12.04

I'm going to have to add my vote to the anti-black&yellow brigade.

Bees, hornets, and wasps all give me the shrieking runaways. I don't know where this phobia came from, but it seems to run in the family (my little sister has it worse than I do, and neither of us has ever been stung).

If I have to, I *can* dispose of one of those minions of the Dark One, but then I have to sit and shake for a while (or get a stiff drink to quash the adrenaline mindfuck).

14:17 / 16.12.04

Wasps are indeed unholy and an affront to nature. Consider the banging against the window thing. They do this purely to frighten people. They're not trying to get out, they're trying to draw attention to themselves - to scare you. Using a magazine to guide them through the open portion is just playing into their sticky little hands. Think about it:
Outside your house, an astronomically small percentage of the atmosphere is wasp. Yet that infinitesimal fraction still makes it though the narrowest chink in a window. Once inside your house, the Wasp Density - the parts per million of the atmosphere that is wasp - is billions of times greater than outside. And yet, and yet, does the wasp escape through the open window? No. The laws of semi-permeable membranes do not apply. This is waspmosis, and it is wrong, wrong, wrong.

14:29 / 16.12.04

honestly, just bloody grow up the lot of you. they go away if you ignore them, and the plant-pollination thing they do is actually really important. bunch of whingeing sissies.

14:33 / 16.12.04

sorry if anyone doesn't like 'sissies' by the way. not sure on the history of the word, swap it for 'wimps' or something if it offends.

14:34 / 16.12.04

they go away if you ignore them

Hahahahahahh! Yes, they "go away" into your bed, or your slipper or the boot of your car - then, when your wasp-ignoring has reached its zenith (ie. you're not even remotely thinking of wasps) that's when they strike.

14:40 / 16.12.04

well that medical fact has rattled me a little it's true, but i'll be damned if i'm going to admit that on an internet thing like this.

14:43 / 16.12.04

Consider the banging against the window thing. They do this purely to frighten people.

I think it's because they don't really understand windows, much like flies aswell. They can see outside clearly, but it's like there's a forcefield there stopping them, or maybe to them a living thing that won't let them move on. If they carry on banging against this daft creature maybe it will let them go back outside. They can't grasp why everything is clear to see outside but there's something there. They don't really understand what a window is.

14:45 / 16.12.04

And the "plant-pollination thing they do"? Pfft. Bees could easily cover their shifts. Wasps are hardly indispensable.

15:04 / 16.12.04

alright, hands up who's got an image of the fireman walking into a french window time and again, then shaking his head a bit befuddledly before having another go? own up.

it's a nice image isn't it? i'm leaving this thread now, and will be back in may, when i will redefine everyone's parameters of vileness by saying the following word:

maybugs

15:12 / 16.12.04

He's out there waiting for his moment

15:25 / 16.12.04

I think it's because they don't really understand windows

Pish and nonsense. They understand windows just fine. They manage to get *in* don't they. And think of the target. They can find a gap in the window from the outside - which is HUGE. How come they can't find the same target (handily highlighted by a fucking draft) from the comparatively tiny number options on offer in my sodding living room? Hey? Eh? What's harder - getting the golf ball into the hole, or getting it out again?

15:27 / 16.12.04

Perhaps the spider-haters might provide opposition to the wasp-haters by approval of the Tarantula Hawk ?

Granted they don't live in England, but they're kinda cool.

Though personally, I prefer tarantulas. Nice little fuzzy critters they are.

15:33 / 16.12.04

I don't like spiders, but I wouldn't wish a parasitical wasp on them. Spiders give me the creeps, but I can see why they exist, wasps not only creep me out they can actually hurt me, and serve no purpose, thus spiders win.

15:35 / 16.12.04

"Once the egg hatches, the tiny grub, initially connected to the spider by the tip of its tail, bends over, attaches its head and begins to suck. It continues sucking until its final moult. It then rips open the spider's abdomen, thrusts its head and part of the thorax inside, and "feeds ravenously," as one entomologist described it. As one might hope, even for a spider, the tarantula at this point is finally dead."

That's not "kinda cool", Sekhmet. That is vile. I now feel really sick, and just before dinnertime... Cheers!

Plus, it's called a tarantula hawk, but it's neither spider nor bird. That's just confusing.

15:47 / 16.12.04

So, it condemns spiders to slow death through paralysed starvation or, if they're really unlucky, being eaten alive by its indescribably foul larva - and it has an unnecessarily painful sting for a non-social (psychopathic) insect.

The (stupidly-named) Tarantula Hawk is, it would appear, the Bin Laden of waspdom.

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