Yellow Jackets

Two of my children found a yellow jackets' nest in our back yard earlier this week. I heard them screaming in the woods behind our house, but I couldn't see them and, at first, I thought they were just playing. That may sound weird, but my children have interesting ideas about what it means to play. It soon became clear that one or more of them was hurt. I could see them running toward me, but I still didn't know what was going on until they finally got close enough for me to see a bunch of yellow jackets swarming around them.

They both were stung in multiple places and, though I tried to swat the bugs off, I found many of them were stuck to the kids' clothes. Luckily, most of them had missed stinging skin, but it was a pain to get rid of them all. After a few seconds, I rushed the kids into the house to get them away from the remaining swarm and finished picking off the bugs and killing them.

In my rush to get the kids away from the swarm, I left our dog out there to deal with the rest. I don't know how many times he got stung, but he fought them off as best he could. I didn't realize he was with them. Poor guy. After dealing with the ones stinging my kids, I pulled the dog in the house and dealt with the ones stuck to him. I was amazed how resilient they were. I tried swatting at them thinking they would let go and fly off, but they just endured the swats and kept their stingers in his skin. I had to pick them off one by one and kill them. One of the stingers was inadvertently left in his skin and made the poor guy really uncomfortable until my wife found it and took it out.

Somehow I got away with only one sting, but it hurt enough to give me a lot of respect for my kids' and dog's endurance and for the power of a yellow jacket's sting. There's a University in the south whose mascot is the yellow jacket. I always thought it was a strange choice for a mascot - a friend of mine even joked about the Georgia Tech Bumblebees - but I think I see the logic behind the choice now. Those stings are really potent!