From Above

This time of year I don’t worry about bees, wasps or hornets very much but I may need to think about it a little more. Stinging creatures and me do not get a long well, I swell up like a puffer fish each time and a single sting hurts for several weeks with the actual site forming a hard lump that has to diminish over time. I’m not talking about our very important honey bees but those nasty bugs that like to harbor in the rafters, gutters, fence posts, piles of limbs, in ground nests and the like.

The last year was a mild bee year. I was only accosted once and it was a glancing blow. The sucker did not have time to get his full load of venom expelled and I only had a mild reaction, it was still painful but I did not live with the heat, swelling and site hardening as usual.

Insects as with many things in nature have population curves. There are years where they are thinned out by the weather through extreme cold, heat, wet, or storms and then several years of rebuilding their dominance in the niche they had filled before. Although we did not see a great amount of the insects the last two years, they are slowly making their comeback. We are finding the evidence in and around the barns.

Over the winter I have found yellow jackets and wasps hanging around the stock tanks while we are filling them with water for the cows. The insects are lethargic from the winter season and look like they would not be a threat but once the weather warms a bit, these creatures will become the dominate members of great nests with offspring too numerous to count. We are finding the abandoned nests both mud wasps and paper wasps that had reared many bugs last year around the barns every time we move wood, or lift tarps.

We found the remains of a very large nest at the base of a tall fir tree at the base of the hill. From what little remains intact but seeing all the bits strewn about in a large area, I am assuming the nest was about the size of basketball when it was full of incubating bees.

This is a spot where the cows hang out, where we feed the main herd in the fall and one of my main trails up into the forest for mushroom hunting forays. The nest was high enough in the trees to be inconspicuous, I had no idea it was hiding in the branches of the big tree. This is just another sign that the creatures are on the boom side of the population bubble and we will be looking into setting out the bee traps in early March to help curb the growth.