Yellowjackets!

Man I hate yellowjackets. The area surrounding and behind my new shop is full of overgrown grass and brush along with trash littering the whole forest area back there. I was cleaning some of it up today, working my way from the front edge of the building back into the woods. I got along the fence line of my neighbor's property and was cutting down these head high weeds with the weed whacker and noticed something on my neck followed immediately by intense pain coming from multiple parts of my body. Right away I knew from past experience that I had stumbled upon an angry hive of yellowjackets, and they were stinging the hell out of me. The one on my neck, being the first to arrive with the element of surprise, got his stinger in good and deep before it broke off from me swatting him away.

After dropping the running weed whacker and running away while doing what must have looked like the weirdest twitchy flailing break dance (you know the one, we've all done it), I managed to get away and get them all off of me with only four stings and no falls. The problem now was that my weed whacker was still sitting there idling away, its noisy vibrating countenance continuing to be a target for the swarming hive of angry wasps who were trying to kill the threat, and I couldn't walk anywhere near it without more of them attacking me.

Luckily the other day I had been after an aerial wasp nest right by the front door and another one in the shed, so I had some wasp spray handy. I rained a stream down on the swarm from afar and sat down to rest as they hopefully died, the engine still rattling away. My cellphone camera isn't good enough to show the bees swarming, but you can see some of the wasp spray foam speckled up and down the shaft in this pic.

This is good example of the welts from a yellowjacket sting on my forearm. Lucky for me I never developed an allergy to them, and I was stung so many times in my youth that my body has built up quite a tolerance for the venom. These welts were gone after just a few minutes.

The wasps weren't showing any signs of weakening for quite some time, but they began to finally look a bit more lethargic after a good while longer. I gave them another shot for good measure and right then, to my good fortune, the engine finally stalled, and the savage little insects began to lose interest in it. Either they felt that they had successfully killed the weedwhacker, or they themselves died. I'm not sure which scenario is correct, maybe a bit of both, but regardless, I was able to sneak over there and grab it away from them at that point. Then I ran away like a scared child so I could get back to work, far away from them.

#diy