A little backround first:
My backyard neighbor had an extra lot between my yard and her yard, so they sold it for some new construction. So all the guys that worked back there were digging for the house, so the ground was all soft…perfect for making an underground beehive.
Now to my story:
My neighbor, and a friend of ours where at my house, and we decided to walk over to my neighbors house to hand out for a while, so we went across my backyard, and through the gate where the new house is being built, my neighbor Lauren kicked a dirt clump near my gate, thinking it was just some extra dirt…it wasn’t. (know where this is going?) I was the last one through the gate, so when Lauren and our friend Jessi started screaming “BEES! BEES!” and I felt a bunch of things crawling up my legs, I did the only thing a kid would do. I stood there and screamed “THEY ARE STINGING ME!” Then my brain clicked to RUN LIKE HELL. So we are running across the lawn screaming “BEES!” while an ENTIRE SWARM of bees chase us. It was like in the cartoons, a big ol swarm, with the noise and everything shudders I was being stung all over my legs, one got on my face so I smacked it as hard as I could, god it was terrible. Her mom came out and started to swing at the bees attacking my legs, and of course we didn’t realize their pool there. So I was stung some more times. We finally got the bees off (I had to take off my pants) and we ran instead, where I ran my legs under cold water. I later had to go to the ER, because my feet swelled up to the point where I couldn’t wear shoes.
FINAL STING TOTAL:
Lauren: 3 times in the same spot on her stomach
Jessi: 2 times on the ankle
Me: 14 times. 13 all on my calfs and feet, and one on my cheek. Yes, it was the one I smacked.
shudders My dad and brother tourched the hive for me. I still live in fear of bees. About a week after, I was outside talking on the phone, a bee came near me, I screamed, dropped the phone and ran inside.
I am now either allergie or immune to bee stings. I do not want to find out shudders
Radio antennas on cars do this all the time.
Birds have a hard time seeing the antennas, get too close, & at 40 mph, the bird’s head is just sliced off, & the body tossed aside.
The Nashville Zoo is providing a home to a Bald Eagle that lost one of its wings to the antenna on a car. He’s well cared for, & gets a chance to mate, thus helping to preserve the species.
I’d like to thank the OP for helping me cut my caloric intake for the day. Gah! I was eating supper when I reached this thread. Bleargh! You REALLY needed to put a TMI label in the title, badly.
I don’t mind most bugs. Even spiders are cool with me, as long as they’re not too big. But I have a thing about scorpions. They creep me out no end. Something about the super-long arm-things and the big claws and the lack of a head just make me want to crawl right out of my skin. (Crawdads and lobsters are fine, since they have the common decency to have a freakin’ head. No willies whatsoever.) The stinger is also not on my list of favorite things to find on critters that are within a hundred miles of me. Millipedes and centipedes also give me the urge to flee to Antarctica. I don’t trust nothin’ with that many legs. The way the legs all all move in a wave as they cruise along . . . Ick.
So what did I find on the wall of the bathroom a couple nights ago? No, not a scorpion. No, not a millipede. It was this tiny little bug, smaller than a watermelon seed. It had approximately 1 bajillion little tiny legs and long forelegs with claws. And no discernable head. I am not making this up. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. It was not long like a millipede or centipede. Just a roundish, flat buglike body with a bajillion legs like a fringe of hair around it. And it didn’t have a tail like a scorpion. Just the long forelegs scorpion-like claws.
I pondered my desire to kill it, recognizing that the urge sprang from pure prejudice and primitive, irrational fear. I’m a live-and-let live kinda person as far as harmless, non-disease-carrying critters go, and it was far too comically tiny to pose any threat to any of the mammals in the household. Probably it was a carnivore that would eat other little pests. And yet . . . I kept thinking what would happen if it prospered and shudder grew. From the bajillions of legs I’m guessing it was only a larval whatever the hell it is. And god forbid if it should find another one of whatever the hell it is, hook up, and lay eggs somewhere.
I stared for several minutes, mesmerized by its teensy weensy claws and its bajillions of legs as it crawled toward the corner, found nothing of interest there and the crawled back along the wall . . . toward the mirror . . . which it could probably slip behind . . .
I squished it in some toilet paper and flushed it. I am not proud of this, but I know it would have given me nightmares if I’d left it on the loose.
Euuu. The only thing worse than seeing a gross bug that I don’t like is seeing a gross bug that I don’t know what it is. I’d have skooshed it, too.
if not for the quantity of legs I would suggest it was a tick :eek:
Palo Verde beetles, palmetto bugs… it bothers me that there are TWO species of four inch long flying cockroaches in this country. Ah yes, and I get to spend a month and a half down south where they love it.
Years ago CA3799 and I were driving to Grandma’s house, we stopped at Turner Falls (OK) and while walking around we encountered a toy that some kid had left behind (at least that’s what I thought it was), it was a shiny, segmented, brown icky thing about 37’ (or 4") long with somewhere around a Bazillion legs and it had a GUN! (probably), it was some kind of mutant, alien, radioactive millipede. Now I was born and raised in Houston (we gots us some bugs) and normally bugs don’t bother me much but the memory of that Godzilla-like thing haunts me to this day (sniff…sniff).
Unclviny
This is just begging for my maggot story :D. I’ve probably told it here before, but this version was written up a couple of months ago on another board:
So in my callow youth, I, like so many other poor slobs, used to work for a McDonalds. Started on the counter, migrated to cook, then eventually maintainence dude. Still paid for shit, but I could work more at my own pace without somebody looking over my shoulder or having to interact much with asshat customers. Stocked stuff, kept up the grounds, changed the lights, fixed the odd widget, etc.
One annoying little problem was the compactor in the big trash dumpster out back. It kept breaking early or mid-week ( it seemed like it was just a loose connection - I could occasionally get it working myself by playing with it and banging the control panel in the right spot - yet somehow the contract mechanics called out could never definitively fix the problem and it kept re-occurring ), the bags o’ trash would then overflow out of the full dumpster on to the ground, where, as additional weight would pile on top of them, the bottom ones would split open, dumping their contents on the ground for me to discover when I came in Saturday morning. Now this was a decent enough franchise - they regularly disposed of their old, freezer-burned, or otherwise damaged food. Including much meat, cooked and raw. Meat a’ plenty spilled out, festered in the noonday sun and attracted flies a’ million with their ever-so-fast generational turnover. I’d get there Saturday, fuss with the compactor, either get it going myself or call someone if I couldn’t, then when fixed begin compacting stuff and clearing the bags off the ground.
Then I’d get to the bottom layer. No longer encased in bags, but rather an amorphous mound 7 or 8 feet across and a few feet deep, steaming with lovely organic compost action. Shovel time. So I’d start shoveling into the dumpster. The upper layer? Not so bad. The lower layer? SOLID MAGGOTS. No kidding - millions of writhing little fly larvae, a FOOT or more deep. You could scarcely even see the stuff they were feeding on, it was just pure maggoty goodness. So I’d shovel maggots. Big, heaping shovelfulls of little wrigglers, into the dumpster. Once in awhile I’d slip a bit as the shovel hit the upper arc of the swing and a few would come flying back back to squirm in my hair and on my shoulders. When you hit pavement and started scraping the bottom, you inevitably started inadvertently grinding up said youngsters and have shovelfulls of live and squished maggots, with the shovel dripping a little maggot slime. The smell was the worst part. Ah, that sickly-sweet scent of rotting meat. How I remember it now.
Anyway, the anticlimactic upshot is one Saturday I got fed up and insisted the store manger walk down to the dumpster and closely oversee every minute of the clean-up process. We got a new dumpster two days later :p.
- Tamerlane
This same thing happened to me when I was a little girl, and as a result I’ve never been terribly fond of birds - I have this fear that even live ones are filled with worms (this made so much sense when I was little - they eat worms! Ew!!!) Still, Satyricon, your “encounter” gets the prize in my book. The fact that the maggots were so active that you thought it was breathing - UGHHH!!! And the on-the-hand thing. Just too gross. You have my sympathy :eek:
Anyone else curled their legs up under their bottom while reading these? I got to around post #24 and decided I didn’t like my bare feet down there in the dark under the desk…
My story:
Was sitting and chatting with a few relatives on Saturday, when my aunt notices what looked like a white dot moving across a chair near us. Peer closer, and realize it’s a spider. Not just ANY spider, though, this one was special. It was about a the size of a nickel including the legs, but instead of the normal, brownish back you’d expect on a spider, this one had an opaque, milky white, bloated rear. Imagine an underripe holly berry about the size of a jellybean stuck on the back of this thing as it lumbered across the chair. If you looked close enough you could even see a black dot sticking out where it’s spinnerettes were.
After a quick vote(everyone pointed at me) we decided to squish it. I grab a shoe, get ready, then let loose a swing…
…unfortunately the spider, perhaps sensing its incoming death, tried to move at the last moment which caused me to get a perfect hit on the front half of its body. Perfect on any other spider, that is. This one popped like an uberzit, spraying a good 2-3ccs of puss-like goo a good foot away and onto my face.
:eek: :eek: :eek:
Help me Jeebus!
Wasps, I am absolutely terrified of the things. I’m sure other people must think it is amusing when a 21 year old bloke starts swinging his arms arounjd his head and running in circles.
Anyway, all this seems to stem from one incident that I can remember clearly from my childhood. I was on Cub Scout camp, and we were all sat by the campfire eating out scorched burgers. It was late August, just the time when wasps, drunk on fermenting fruit, behave like the football hooligans of the insect world, flying their lazy, meandering paths aroung , and stinging whatever they come near. One wasp, obviously attracted by the ketchup on my food, flew up to my face, and hovered just in front of my mouth. I shook my head, but it stayed there, and slowly, with a deliberateness that was excruciating, I saw the needle point of the sting deploy from the wasp’s shiny black and yellow abdomen. Suddenly the wasp, without warning swept forward, stinging me on the upper lip. I screamed, and jumped up. Everything my dad had told me (“They won’t harm you if you don’t bother them.”) was wrong, these were little minions of the Devil himself, clad in shiny chitinous armour and armed with viscious, stabbing poisoned lances. A leader put some foul smelling ointment on the sting, and I sat there with the throbbing of my top lip a reminder of the evil of these, most vile of insects.
Because of this incident, summer is a plagued time for me. When a wasp approaches, I exhibit one of two responses, either running with arms flailing and no care for the danger I might run into (roads, for example), or I freeze, and stand like a statue in the hope that the thing will ignore me. they never do, they always pick me out of a group of people to buzz around.
Damn them.
Yeah I know about the flying kind but here is his spidery cousin. http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/research/biodiversity/invertebratesprog/invertid/bug_details.asp?Bu_ID=174 At this very moment I could probably find 15 in my house (it’s wintery they come inside and I don’t kill them). Supposedly they are more venomous then most spiders they just don’t have human peircing fangs. Happy me 
Just to squick you spider hating types…my no kill policy applies to the 50 cent sized black bugger on my bedroom curtains. I check out he/she is still in the same place when I go to bed but I don’t want to kill him/her.
As a bonus it is Preying Mantis egg laying season. They are everywhere! I want to nominate them for worlds cutest bug! They have the cutest eyes and are very people tolerant.
Icckkkkkkkkkkkkk and death to maggots and their parents though.
Maggot goo on your haaaands…blaaarrgh…
I was cleaning off a bookshelf once and moved a pile of papers and uncovered a huge fuzzy blob. Thinking it was one of my son’s stuffed animals he’d shoved up on the shelf, I reached for it and it moved. More accurately, it leaped. Towards me. It was the biggest spider I’ve ever seen–I’ve been told that it was a wolf spider but I prefer to think of it as Gigantic Spider-Beast from the 9th Circle of Hell.
I’ve never seen a bigger or more aggressive spider. It was about the size of my hand and I was afraid to squash it because I thought it might crunch. shudder I honestly can’t remember how I dealt with it. I suppose I’ve blocked that part of the experience out of my mind. I’m sure it involved lots of screaming and shuddering though.
Here’s a link to the Mailbag article on daddy longlegseses.
My wife and I had parked under a tree in the Malibu Hills to go to a party. When we got back to the car, it was very dark. When we got in the car, my wife was going ‘ick!’ and brushing at her face and hair with her hands. I said ‘what happened?’ She said ‘I walked through a spider web’. I said ‘yuck. I hate when that happens.’
Then we drove home, about a 45 minute drive. I unlocked our front door, opened it, and turned to my wife to say something. She was standing under the porch light, and I noticed something on the front of her jacket. A large brown something about the size of half a walnut shell. I said ‘Don’t move.’ She obeyed. I carefully reached out and flicked it off her jacket. It flew off behind her. I said ‘OK’. She said, ‘What was it?’ I said, ‘You do not want to know.’
Later, I went back out to the porch, and there it still was, alive but stunned. Apparently it had slept or otherwise remained motionless on my wife the whole 45 minute drive. I shuddered to think what would have happened if it had started crawling on her as we were zooming down the freeway. I threw a matchbook down next to it to take a photo with the matchbook for scale. The photo did not come out well enough to post, but take my word for it, with it’s legs fully extended, the spider was a bit larger than the matchbook, one of the largest orb-weaver spiders I have ever seen in Southern California.
:eek:NOOOOOOooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOoooooo…