Bald Faced Hornets are Crazy (and people are too!)
The Bald Faced Hornet. It’s not really even a hornet; it’s a wasp. But it will kill you if you call it otherwise.
As Meredith and I were chilling with the ‘rents [1] Sunday, my mom and dad start talking to me about the Bald Faced Hornet’s nest they have growing outside.
Phase 1 – Q’bert
Yeah, if you think having a wasp’s nest outside your house is bad, check these dudes out… I mean girlfriends, ‘cause only the girls can sting you repeatedly until you are dead. So, these badboys just the queen comes out of hiding in the spring and builds here the little nest you see above. Then she makes herself a bunch of worker bees BFHs [2] which then build a nest around the nest:
Phase 2: Murderball… there is one of them there, at the end of the cone!
Then the queen goes and makes a bunch more workers and the process repeats itself until the nest is bigger than a basketball and she has up to 400 of the workers to kill you with with which to kill you. [3] Not only are these things freaking paranoid about people making vibrations near their hood, they don’t even like your smell, man.
But this ain’t even the crazy part. Wait until you read this page: Bald-faced hornet Part II. This is what some insane man named Mike Ewbank wrote:
“I have been around many bald face hornets nest here in Mendocino co. California. In fact I have one right now on the back side of my solar panel tracker. Its attached to back of one of the solar panels and wrapped around wiring harness. Very nice as I’ve watched it grow all summer from my deck. Its as large as a basket ball.
I found a large rattlesnake caught in the chicken wire fence around my veggie garden. It had died so it was a snake in perfect condition and I decided I wanted to try and strip it of its flesh and have this great rattlesnake skeleton. Local yellow jackets I thought would be the ones to strip away the flesh. Tacked out on piece of plywood the yellow jackets had more than half of the flesh eaten within a week. I have watched bald faced hornets chase and catch yellow jackets in my garden over the summers and that same scene played out with this dead rattlesnake. What was amazing though was the bald faced hornets started hiding inside the exposed ribcage of the snake and when the yellow jackets would squeeze thru ribs to tear off meat inside the hornets would grab them, kill them and squeeze back out thru ribs with prize in they’re jaws. Pretty cool show to watch up close. Keep the neat hornet stories coming.”
Did you catch that? [4] The man nailed up a rattlesnake, and these bald-faced hornets used it as a yellow jacket hunting ground! Maybe pictures will help: not only do they turn A. into B, but used B. to hunt C. That is one mean foe of moe.
But, while the bald-faced hornet is all kinds of BA [5] ; what crazy cat nails up a dead rattlesnake to watch it get eaten by a nest of bald-faced hornets? Shoulda called atkins.
Just in case you are sleeping tonight:
10 Giant Japanese Hornets Vs. 10,000 Honey Bees – Amazing videos are here
- that is Parents, for those of you not down with 2005 suburban adult male slang [↩]
- yeah, these thing murder bees for fun. the very bees that killed Caulkin in that one movie that was sad that some people have seen [↩]
- ok, sometimes having the preposition at the end of the sentence is just cooler, man. [↩]
- If not, you read like a driscollite reading The Shack. [↩]
- bonified awesome, what did you think it meant? [↩]
