When I was a kid, I went out of my way to step on honeybees.
They were my childhood nemesis. Bees and those nasty sticker bushes that hid in the tall grass that inevitably found my tender, shoeless feet every summer.
Fast forward a few decades and now I know that bees are like super duper important and the whole dang Earth is going to implode because the little striped bastards are disappearing.
So I make amends by going out of my way not to step on the stinger-assed little bastards. I even out sugar water for them.
And I try my best to be as hippy dippy as my Generation X traumatized brain will allow, okay? If I find a snail on the sidewalk, I will pick them up and put them in a safer place. I put out snacks and food for all of my backyard vermin friends. I cut up apples, lay out peanuts, and get the high energy suet cakes for the crackhead chickadees that swarm my feeders.
Once, we bought some traps to catch the carpenter bees that keep burrowing into the porch but I took it down because the idea of these poor bugs slowly dying inside a jar gave me nightmares.
I never kill spiders. They do a lot more good than bad in my book.
I even allow the wasps that camp out in my garden shed some leeway.
Yeah. Wasps. I know that most people think they are corseted winged demons from hell but I thought, “Hey. They deserve to live as much as I do. Right? Right!”
Until today.
I was taking some gardening gear out to the shed when something slammed into my arm. Out of nowhere! I felt this BAM! and then a STAB! and then a WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?
I dropped the watering cans and screamed, “Motherfucker! What the hell?”
I looked down to see where I was assaulted.
Oh, you bastard.
What I’m trying to say is…..I thought we had a deal, Wasp Dudes. You stay on your side. I stay on mine. I let you live your little buzzy lives with little to no interaction and you don’t attack me.
But obviously I was mistaken. And you decided to draw First Blood.
And that was your mistake.
I declare the Summer of 2021 to be Waspapocalypse: The Stinger Falls.
BRING IT!
Nikki Nelson-Hicks 