I’ve been stung many times over the years - last time I was watering out back and grabbed the hose where a yellow jacket had landed.
My “favorite” time I was in my car and a yellow jacket flew in the window down my collar and stung me like 4 times on my back.
I pulled over into a parking lot and ripped my shirt off. Son of a bitch survived and flew away.
Second favorite I was mountain biking on a trail up to where my grandpa lived in the hills in the Bay Area. Wasp landed on my leg and crawled up my shorts and stung me on the inside of my thigh.
He was in the care facility part of the place when I got there and one of the nurses gave me some magic that made the pain stop immediately. Can’t remember what, was over 20 years ago.
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I think we can adopt the regex quote here:
“Now you have two problems”
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So beautiful, and they keep excellent time, too!
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You kill wasps by drowning them, ultimately more humane than letting them starve to death. You could also hook up a car battery to the mesh inside the box and electrocute them too.
I didn’t think wasps were useful for anything, but you learn new things every day.
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Oh, lordy, I so want to read Wodehouse’s version of The Wasp Factory now.
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#notallspiders
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There’s an appropriately wasp-related limerick involving ‘Menzies’:
There wis a young lassie named Menzies,
That askit her aunt whit this thenzies.
Said her aunt wi a gasp,
“Ma dear, it’s a wasp,
An you’re haudin the end whaur the stenzies!”
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@L0ki Seth Grahame-Smith or Ben H. Winters needs to invert the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies-style literary mashup genre, and start hijacking horror literature with pre-Victorian novel sensibilities:
- The Little Wasp Factory Women
- The Mountains of Madness & Scotch Reviewers
- Prometheus & Cujo Unbound
- Jane Eyre’s Rendezvous in Averoigne
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Oddly enough I can really see a Wodehouse Culture novel.
Bumbling, genuinely nice, well meaning Culture chappy trying to sort out his pals’ problems with the aid of his drone pal, Jeeves, while avoiding his co-parent Sun-Earther Dahlia Travers’ attempts to embroil him in their latest art zine catastrophe.
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My recollection was that the gliders only came with a set sold at Sears.
I loved Micronauts, even though some (I’m looking at you, Hydrocopter) didn’t work right out-of-the-box. Biotron only worked as long as it tool the Ray-O-Vacs to leak into his innards. Microrail was kind of anticlimactic once I finally got it assembled (maybe because I already had a train set). But Space Glider, Baron Karza, and the Photon Sled were cool.
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Growing up, we had a hive of enormous bees (not sure if they were bumble or carpenter) start building a nest in the outside wall of our brick house one year. For a variety of reasons, not least of which being that my brother has a legit phobia of the things after being stung in the ear when he was little, they had to go. Because they were about 15 feet up, my mom decided that the safest way to deal with them was to get a can of Raid with a long-distance spray nozzle and blast at the hole from ground level. One of them avoided the spray and made a dive bomb run at my mom. I got an object lesson in how lethal Raid is when she hit it mid-air and it just dropped out of the sky dead.
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Looking through the an image search for the toys I see I missed out on a lot of the larger pieces. My parents didn’t typically splurge on more expensive toys. I had the astro station and many of the smaller characters. I had Force Commander and Oberon. I wanted to be Force Commander in centaur form so much. So so so much. 
Sooooo majestic.
My favorite character from the comics was bug.
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Needs more Yakety Sax.
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Technically they just paralyze spiders to serve as living food sources for their ravenous larvae; rather than eating them. Some of which are clever enough to eat the less vital tissue first so that the victim remains fresh longer.
I’m not sure if any of the spider-focused ones have this; but some that target cockroachs have specialized sensors on their stingers for accurate targeting of the victim’s brain.
And the ones that go after caterpillars that have a mutualistic virus incorporated into their genome that gets copied out and injected along with the eggs to suppress host immune response.
Parasitoids are hardcore.
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Lexicat: Hey! Those are scorpions! Scorpions aren’t insects!
Adoring BBS Constituents: Oh, thank you! There wasn’t enough pedantry in this thread!
Lexicat: My business here is done! [Doot! Doo-doo dooooooot! 
]
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Galls are, of course, insect parasites (usually flies or wasps), but I’m impressed by the wasp that parasitizes the larvae if the gall wasps:
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Hyperparasitism!
The cabbage is often attacked by the larva of the Cabbage White butterfly. These caterpillars are parasitized by a species of wasp which lays its eggs inside the Caterpillar. These wasp larvae are in turn parasitized by a different wasp which must inject its eggs into those larvae while they are still inside the Caterpillar.
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