B.C. by Mastroianni and Hart for April 10, 2020

Welcome to 2020!

If that was a big wasp, it can feel like a hot, searing dagger in your arm…. I’d yell like that too !

… relatively speaking.

And THIS, Ladies and Gentlemen, is when the “Tarzan Yell” was invented!

(But not the “attitude”)

When I was young (maybe five), I was stung by a bee at a family reunion. Oh the pain! And tears! Luckily, I had a great aunt (we called her Aunt Tillie) who was able to calm me and ease the hurt by using an ice cube. She’s long dead now, but that incident still sticks in my mind some 60 plus years later. That side of my family isn’t that big; and the reunion was a pretty big deal. Geography has kept me from attending many in recent years. I got to visit her in a home for the elderly maybe a year before she died; and her cheer still sticks with me. Funny how things like that stay in one’s mind.

You never forget someone who loves you and who you love in return.

That was a stinging rebuke.

Hey, BooBoo a pick a nik basket

I’ve had many wars with ‘yellow jacket’ wasps here at the home I’ve had for over 40 years. I’ve lost a few battles, but I usually win the war, sometimes by taking extreme measures. I now hang yellow jacket traps on either end of my house, to keep them from chasing away the hummingbirds at my feeders (which won’t be going up for about 3 weeks).

I’ve only been stung once in my life and I vividly remember who, what, when, where and why.

One stung hero…..not

Hey, a healthy respect for the combat abilities of bees is a vital survival instinct. Not sorry.

We should’ve stayed swinging through our trees.

Don’t insect species outnumber all others by a ridiculously large margin? And that’s the just the known/identified species. . .

I’m terrified of bees. The next sting could kill me! When I had a horse I was given an epinephrine needle which I kept in my saddle bag just in case. Luckily, I never had to use it.

Define short.

At least we can see that menace.. the current one that may do us in is invisible..

Endeavor to persevere.

Those Jurassic bees pack a wallop.

I’ve never had much reaction to bees. “Ow. Oh, a bee.” Now the wasp that stung me right at the bottom of the breastbone was more of a bother.

Hobbes has told that to Calvin often!

There was a time when we six were walking single file on a trail in the Canadian boonies from campsite to lake to fish, I third in line and totally innocent was mistaken for the perp who stepped on the nest of German Yellow-jackets. Yes, I ran like a little girl, but when I came to the water the trite and hackneyed memory of jumping in and ruining the contents of my meager wallet resulted in me slapping the pheromones out of them as they landed. It worked, but a decade later I learned on the Discovery Channel it was the wrong reaction.

Unfprtunately, NOT

I’d like to think some of us will persevere.

I have to wonder what cavemen did for insect bites / stings? Mix mud and water and apply to wound???

Well, now we know one of the few things that’ll make Curls “lose his cool”

Speaking of which… ;)

He should be thankful that it was not an Asian hornet; those nasty critters are about 2" in length; It makes me wonder how big they were in prehistoric times…..

It matters a lot where you are stung. I apparently stepped on a bee and got it in the arch of my foot when I was 12. I broke my arm a couple months alter and it hurt about as much. More recently I was stung in the chest by a bee and almost didn’t notice it. In Southern Arizona the Maricopa Harvester ant is the big Kahuna. It is a big red ant that seems to delight in crawling up legs until it reaches the edge of underwear, where it gets frustrated and stings. The pain is approximately the same as a yellow-jacket sting but it lasts most of an hour.