Show Me the Honey

by Dave Doroghy

  When wasps do attack, they do so with a vengeance. My hive of sick and diseased bees was unequipped to stop them. The once reliable and robust guard bees were now listless, battle-worn invalids, unable to thwart the ruthless invading wasps. It was no match—I actually watched the wasps fly up to the hive’s entrance, bite the guard bees to death, and march in. Injured bees, dead bees, and bee parts littered the entrance. You can tell once a bee has been in a bad fight because it loses its fuzzy outer coat. It usually also loses a leg or two.

  Even reducing the size of the hive’s entrance was no longer helping. The wasps bullied their way in. After gaining entry into the hive, they came back on a regular basis to steal more and more honey and larvae (baby bees), which they take back to their nests and feed to their wasp larvae. Every day, hundreds of wasps were dispatched from their nests to overthrow my hive. Every day, these unruly heathens were eating more and more of my bees.

  While all this was going on, my useless Kona Queen was probably somewhere in the hive hula dancing to Don Ho records. Since she never laid enough eggs, we didn’t have enough healthy young bees to take up the charge and continue the vibrant circle of life in the hive. Between the low birth rate from the deadbeat queen and the high slaughter rate by the wasps, my two bee boxes were housing about one-quarter of the bees they had when the hive was healthy. The remaining bees, sadly, didn’t have the same pep and zip as they had before. What was really troubling was that winter, a time when the hive needed to be at maximum strength and population to survive, was just around the corner. I had one last chance to save the hive. I needed to stop the wasps.

  It was time for me to bring out the heavy artillery. Come hell or high water, I wasn’t going to let those damn marauding killer wasps rob and kill my poor little bees. The weary bees and I had worked too hard for what little honey was left in my decrepit hive to simply have it ripped off from right underneath our collective proboscises. Under no circumstances would the unruly, destructive gang of wasps circling my float home be allowed to pillage the ragtag inhabitants of my weakened, defenceless hive. Not on my watch. Nope. The proverbial buck would stop here. To protect my girls, I sat on my float home’s back deck in a rickety black wicker chair next to my beehive, armed with three weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

  The first WMD I used was a plastic tennis racket–shaped electric fly swatter, its killing efficiency increased by the brand new AA batteries I had installed earlier that morning. When the plastic racket’s wires made the slightest contact with a wasp, the would-be intruder was immediately zapped to death. Whoever invented this gadget will have to answer to 100 trillion fried bugs at heaven’s gate all asking the same question: “What happened?” As the death racket’s operator and executer, you need very little skill or experience. It’s easy. All you need to do to make contact with an incoming wasp is to wave the racket back and forth in the air as if it were a magic wand. Even the slightest grazing with the racket’s highly charged, interwoven silver wires instantly turns a healthy wasp into a crispy critter. The racket’s generous “death surface” gives you a good chance of success, and you can sometimes even hear them pop and explode after a direct hit. It’s not something I enjoy doing (that much, anyway), but no one ever said beekeeping was all pretty flowers and rainbows.

  My commonsensical brother-in-law Len taught me about the next wasp extermination tool: a simple everyday vacuum cleaner. The tip of a vacuum hose has a remarkable suction radius. As with the yellow plastic racket swatter, you just need to get the vacuum’s tornado-strength force in the general vicinity of a wasp, and it’s back to Kansas for that bug.

  Sitting there in my bee suit on the back deck, I had two modern labour-saving pest control devices to protect the hive from brutal invasion. In my left hand, I held the electric swatter; in my right hand, the nozzle of a vacuum, plugged in and running at full power. Isn’t electricity a wonderful thing? I preferred the wasp-sucking vacuum method. It was cleaner—no dead bugs dropping at my feet, no snap, crackle, and pop, and no disagreeable odour. But in the back of my mind I wondered what happened to the wasps after they got sucked into the one-way trap and were carried by the powerful suction motor down into the vacuum cleaner’s storage bag. Could they live down there? Could they breed down there? The vacuum bag would be full of dust and dirt and random detritus, possibly including some tiny bits of food. Ironically, I might have been transferring them into a wasp Shangri-La. After I stowed the vacuum in the closet, the concealed bag would be dark and quiet and full of food crumbs. Just the environment wasps love. Could the 30 or 40 wasps I sucked in that morning form a colony deep in the bowels of my Hoover, multiply tenfold, and escape into my home in the middle of the night? That, dear reader, is the stuff of nightmares.

  So, following my killing spree, I pulled out the ever-handy duct tape and plugged the vacuum’s nozzle, their only possible way out. I replaced the vacuum bag the next day. The modern disposable bag had an only two-inch-diameter hole and I couldn’t see inside. I wasn’t about to grab a flashlight and stick my eyeball up to the hole, allowing a wasp the ultimate revenge of tearing off a chunk of my cornea. Who knows what happened to those wasps that were sucked in earlier? Something tells me it wasn’t a happy ending; thus, dead or alive, they got taken out with the trash.

  The final wasp destruction method I used that morning was a simple, old-fashioned pair of thick beekeeping gloves. The leather that covered my hands and fingers made it impossible for wasps to bite through while I squished them.

  I needed to quickly decide in any given moment which of the three execution methods to use, depending on whether the wasps were flying or crawling. Mid-air flights were best intercepted with the electric death racket. Alternatively, rowdy wasps that landed on the hive’s front entrance looking to break in past the guard bees were immediately dispatched to Hoover heaven. If a wasp was walking around on the flat metal surface of the hive’s lid, sometimes it was easiest to reach my hand out and squish it. One conclusive scientific observation I made after my first hour-long extermination study was that wasps react slower to a heavy gloved hand thunderously descending upon them than bees do. Bees have two big eyes—plus three small ones—that wrap all the way around their heads with about 6,000 lenses to spot a swift impending blow from any direction. Maybe wasp eyes have only 4,000 lenses and therefore less peripheral vision. I don’t know; I’m a beekeeper, not an entomologist–ophthalmologist. What I do know is that in the hour I sat there, I hoovered 17 wasps, zapped 11, and squished 21 for a total death count of 49.

  At the peak of summer, the average wasp nest holds about 5,000 potential marauders. Did you catch that? Wasps live in nests and bees live in hives. If you have a tough time recalling which is which, just do what I do and remember that “nest” rhymes with “pest.” Regardless of what you call a wasp’s home, it’s easy to do the math and figure out how many wasps I killed that morning relative to the wasp nest’s population: less than 1 percent. I figured I would have to sit there for at least 100 hours or about four straight days to neutralize the threat to my girls.

  Unlike bees, wasps don’t winter. Only the hardy queen wasp lives to see the next calendar year. The entire wasp colony dies during late fall, and the queen flees. She finds a tiny crack in a rock or tree to hide in and hibernates for five or six months. She emerges in the spring to build an entirely new nest from scratch. I thought if I could keep my beehive alive for another few months, the wasp problem would simply go away.

  Sitting out there on my deck in my protective suit, I would occasionally kill a bee in the process of trying to kill a wasp. I’d shrug this off to the uneven suction radius of the vacuum cleaner or the bulky, oversized voltage screen of the electric racket. Once or twice, my heavy-handed leather glove accidently landed on the wrong insect species. You may think that inadvertently killing my own bees would bring on a tremendous amount of guilt, conflict, and remorse. Not really. Here’s the way I look at it: once a wasp makes it past the guard bees into the hive, it
becomes a maniacal killing machine. I observed many a tussle between my bees and the attacking wasps. The wasps always won. My poor girls are smaller than the wasps and have only one line of defence: to sting once. Wasps have a huge upper hand in that they can sting and bite repeatedly. Like bees, wasps are equipped with a stinger that contains poisonous venom. While a bee can sting only once because its stinger becomes stuck in its victim, a wasp’s permanent stinger remains intact and gets reloaded with venom to sting again and again. Wasps also have sharp teeth or mandibles to hold and bite off pieces of prey, which they carry back to their nests. I read somewhere that after a single wasp invades a hive, it can easily kill between 20 and 30 bees. As the pragmatic and conscientious steward of my hive, if I accidently sucked an errant bee into the vacuum, it was for the greater good. Each wasp that got fried, squished, or dragged into the dust bag resulted in 20 or 30 bees getting to live for a few more weeks. Some bees were sacrificed, but in the end I did what I had to do. I had their backs. Not that I enjoyed this.

  I did make a real effort to distinguish between bees and wasps in order to kill only the bad guys. That particular morning, I had to be super observant and totally focused. Wasps are slightly bigger than bees, sleeker, and a brighter yellow. They are sometimes called yellow jackets for that reason, and their contrasting black stripes seem to stick out more than the muted two-toned friendly bees. But the telltale sign that distinguishes wasps from bees is the way they fly, and since my electric-racket strikes were aimed at airborne wasps, immediately identifying them in flight was important. To increase my identification accuracy, I needed to have my 2.5-magnification reading glasses on under my bee suit’s veil. Hundreds of wasps and bees flying frantically around the immediate vicinity of the hive are all jumbled together and to the untrained eye look like a cloud of bugs. A hobby executioner like me needed a way to quickly distinguish friend from foe. However, it was hard to clearly see their size, shape, and colour through the bee suit’s mesh veil and my always-dirty reading glasses. That’s where the importance of flight patterns came in.

  If you carefully study the flight patterns of both insects as they approach the hive, you will see that bees tend to arrive directly in a more orderly, circular fashion, and they are less jittery than the wasps. Wasps have a completely different way of buzzing around. They scan back and forth when they fly. If you were given an air traffic control computer readout of their flight patterns, it would look like the dark grey right-angle lines a child creates with an Etch A Sketch. Wasps are also more aggressive and quicker in flight than bees, making them a bit harder to pick off with the racket. But they almost always turn at perfect right angles with military precision.

  I first became aware of wasps at the age of seven. To know them is to dislike them. In the summertime, we would occasionally have family dinners outdoors on our veranda, especially when my granny came to visit from New York. No sooner would my sister, my mom, my granny, and I be seated around a wobbly old wooden table, with the sun setting in the background, ready to dig into a delicious meal of roasted chicken and mashed potatoes, than a lone wasp would show up out of nowhere and ruin our lovely dinner. At the first sight of a wasp, Miriam would scream, Granny would almost faint, Mum would run inside to get a rolled-up newspaper to swat at it, and I can’t remember what I would do. I probably just sat there daydreaming with my finger up my nose, wearing my cute red Canadian Mountie outfit from Granny, quietly observing and thinking that maybe in 50 years I would write about the winged intruder.

  And it happened, because sure enough, five decades later, there I sat, alone on my back deck, clutching a vacuum nozzle in one hand and a plastic electric tennis racket in the other, wearing a beekeeping suit with my reading glasses on underneath my face net. I had a lot of time to imagine writing about these hazy, trivial childhood details zigzagging through my brain like wasp flight patterns. Remembering those innocent, carefree summer dinners on the veranda, I envisioned the way the wasps flew and ruined all of our meals. My mind drifted back to our old white-and-green house on the corner of 11th and Crown, where a perennial wasp nest hung like a lantern in the cherry tree in the backyard. I vividly recalled the erratic movements of the wasps—the sharp right-angle turns, the frenetic reconnaissance before they landed. I remembered the horrible buzzing sound. Finally, I recalled the most disgusting detail of all: the likelihood that before arriving at our dinner table, the wasp had just landed on a big hunk of our German shepherd’s poo. And, covered in Thor’s feces, it was now crawling all over our savoury chicken. Is it any wonder I can’t stand wasps? As I sat guarding my bees that morning, my resolve to kill as many wasps as I could only deepened. I had a score to settle.

  Suddenly I realized I didn’t have any more time to daydream. I had an important appointment downtown that morning. As bad as it felt, I had to abandon my weakened and fragile bee colony, forcing them to fend for themselves for a few hours. I drove into town picturing the never-ending onslaught of wasps my bees were facing on their own. To distract myself from these sad thoughts, I turned the news on the radio up full volume. With me not there to fend them off, the wasps would simply overpower the guard bees, probably killing many in the process. They’d march into the hive and continue their killing spree as they bullied their way up through the frames toward our sealed cells of honey and the innocent newborn baby bees. Nature can be so damn cruel. It truly is a dog-eat-dog or, more accurately, a bug-eat-bug world. Wasps were a lesser life form than bees—a more sinister life form. Although the two bugs have a lot in common, bees became vegetarians millions of years ago and, as such, morphed into what I consider to be a gentler, kinder species. There I go anthropomorphizing again, but it’s just how I feel.

  Let’s compare the two insects. Animals need protein. Bees get their protein from the pollen of pretty flowers. Wasps get their protein from showing up uninvited to family barbecues, and from killing and eating my bees. Bees build elegant castles out of wax, moulding them to serve their every need, creating intricate birthing chambers, storage pods, and small living quarters. Wasps gather grass and bark, chew it and mix it with their sticky saliva into a pulpy fibre, and then piece it together into shoddy, substandard paper nests. Wasp nests don’t need to be well built like beehives because wasps abandon their nests in winter. Wasp nests are nothing more than poorly designed, ugly temporary housing. Bees gently flutter from flower to flower; it’s almost poetic to watch them joyfully gather nectar and pollen from sweet clover, thistle, alfalfa, and dandelions. Wasps erratically zero in on dog doo. Bees are prolific pollinators, helping important flowers and plants grow all over the world. Though there is evidence wasps are also pollinators, and they eat a number of garden pests, after watching them snuff out my bees, I still wish they would disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow. It’s also notable that the word wasp is painted on warships and planes, while the word honeybee is lovingly used in children’s books.

  I needed to eradicate these wasps. Driving back to the float home later that afternoon, I stopped by the local hardware store and went straight to the pesticide section. I purchased three wasp traps for less than $20. Two were of the “just add water” variety; the third one required a tasty recipe of household scraps to tempt the wasps into a one-way prison.

  When I got home, I followed the directions on the two ready-mix traps, filling them with water exactly to the blue indicator line on each bag. When it came to preparing wasp bait, I, uncharacteristically, figured it was best to pay attention to the smallest of details. A watery concoction might not be strong enough to attract the villains, and if the premixed crystal liquid bait smell was too concentrated, it might tip them off to something being up. When I had the mixture just right, I jumped into my bee suit and ventured out to the hive with a death trap in each hand. The executioner was back, this time with help from the Woodstream Pest-Control Company. I carefully hung two of their yellow lunch bag–sized plastic traps equal distances to the right and to the left of the hive.

 
I stuck around for a few minutes, and sure enough, the wasps were all over the traps in no time like black on an eight ball. A few seconds after I hung up the bags, the wasps’ flight paths began to divert in that unmistakable jagged traversing pattern, no longer zeroing in on the hive but heading straight to the plastic traps. Once they landed on a trap, they’d sniff, poke, and wander around for 20 to 30 seconds before following the tempting scent to the motherlode of irresistible liquid down below in the bag. Only problem was, unbeknownst to them, to get there they had to proceed through a clever one-way trap door. Content in knowing that wasps were already dying, I went back inside to select the bait to entice more wasps to their deaths.

  My first idea for bait to use in the cylindrical-shaped trap was, of course, mashed potatoes. I knew from my childhood on the summer veranda that mashed potatoes were a tried-and-true wasp attractor. What the heck, maybe I’d even throw in a chicken wing for good measure. However, upon further consideration, I decided it was impractical to whip up a dish of mashed potatoes, especially since I didn’t have any potatoes or butter. At no time did the thought of putting dog doo in the wasp trap even cross my mind.

  Choosing just the right food bait was an important decision, but I didn’t need to rush it. I could relax and concentrate on my options, knowing that while I was ruminating over the perfect insect meal, some of the wasps outside near my beehive were already drowning in two big pools of liquid crystal bait. With the two other traps out there already catching wasps, I had bought my bees a little more time.

  I read through some old emails from Len, who had rid his hive of wasps the previous summer. He had used rotten sardines as bait—not a bad idea. The instructions on the trap’s packaging called for soda pop along with table scraps. I didn’t have any table scraps, so I opened a can of flaked white tuna and scraped it into the trap’s cylinder. I don’t drink soda pop, so I used red wine. I found an old piece of Stilton cheese in the fridge and added that to the mix, thinking it would go well with the wine. Finally, I threw in a banana peel for good measure. I had just set the table for the wasps’ last supper. They loved it. They came over for dinner and never left.