Three stories; two nasty, one weird, the weird one first.
We had a barbecue on Saturday, as usual, it fell to me to cook (I don’t mind really.
So I’m sitting there, turning sausages and meat on skewers, there’s this tickling sensation on my right ankle (I was wearing shorts), I don’t have time to look as the sausages are flaring up. Then there’s this tickling again, but further up this time, but I still don’t take a look until it happens a third time.
I look and there’s a snail halfway up my leg, a freaking SNAIL!
Wasps <shiver> -yellowjackets to you 'merkins.
There was a wasp nest in the void underneath my daughter’s playhouse, which was not good, so I sprayed a whole can of ‘Foaming Wasp Nest Destroyer’ into the entrance. The next few days there was no activity, just a big heap of dead wasps in front of the hole. I decided it would be a good idea to check it out and remove the remains, then fill up the space with gravel to prevent a new nest in future.
I removed the fence panel behind the house and lifted up the playhouse, there was the nest, inert and about the size of a football(soccer). I readied a black bin bag and tried to pick up the nest with a garden fork - it broke open and suddenly there were wasps everywhere, all over my legs, stinging me - I did what any man would do - I screamed like a little girl and ran, flailing my arms ineffectually. I took a dozen or more stings that day. all up my legs (I was wearing shorts again), I went into a hot fever-like state for several hours that afternoon.
Then the next year I was out in the garden and I saw a hornet buzzing around the playhouse. The hornets we have here are about the size of an adult’s thumb and are very aggressive (although all the textbooks say they are peacable, lamb-like creatures). I told my wife about it, but she dismissed it with a wave of the hand (as if I was exaggerating). Over the next week or so, I had more encounters with hornets in the garden, but the missus was always elsewhere - when I tried to tell her about just how mean the thing looked, she would look at me as if I was seven years old.
Anyway, a few days later, she went upstairs to draw the bedroom curtains and I heard a terrible commotion, screaming, shouting, banging etc. I ran up there to find her pounding the floor with a thick mail-order catalogue, when she stopped, I saw a huge hornet there on the floor, twitching in that very much not-dead-going-to-wake-up-soon manner than stinging insects seem to have.
“It’s huge!”
“I know, I told you”
“But it’s huge”
“I know, I told you, they keep coming after me in the garden”
“But it’s huge”
