Show Me the Honey, by Tracy Beckerman

The first time I felt the wasp buzz near my ear, I didn’t really notice it. I was engrossed in a book and just pushed the wasp away without looking. But the second time it got that close, I felt like a fighter jet was performing flight maneuvers around my head, and I was pretty sure the wasp was thinking I was behind enemy lines. The third time he dive-bombed me, I dropped the book and ran out of my deck chair screaming like a little girl. When I thought the coast was clear, I ran for my book, and that’s when I saw it: a giant wasp’s nest. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. It was the size of a small planet, or at least as big as my fist, hanging directly under the bottom of the deck railing next to my lounge chair. As if the sheer size of the nest wasn’t enough to grab my attention, it was also buzzing as wasp after wasp emerged from a lonely hole and then flew off to search for other innocent suburban housewives in upset.

I should mention that when it comes to flying and stinging insects, I distinguish between the good kind (bees) and the bad (murder hornets), terrorist suburban wasps falling somewhere closer to hornets murderers in terms of my feelings of affection for them. I’ll leave the bees but when it comes to wasps I’m firmly on the “I was here first and this bridge isn’t big enough for both of us” camp. So when I saw the nest, I knew what to do.

Although we have a pest control company to deal with such things, I decided that even though the nest was the size of Jupiter, it was still within my ability to grab a nearby stick and bring down the nest of his mount and cast him into oblivion.

Of course, it’s the kind of bad choice that causes people to wake up from comas 20 years later and say, “Well, doctor, the last thing I remember is throwing a little wasp’s nest in oblivion.”

As I was looking for the best stick to use to launch the nest, my daughter-in-law appeared on the bridge.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m looking for a stick to kick this wasp’s nest,” I told him, pointing to the Jupiter-sized nest I had discovered.

“Oh, you don’t need a stick,” she said. Then she walked away and struck the nest with the palm of her hand.

I watched with a mixture of admiration and horror and waited for the nest to fade into oblivion. But he did not sail. He didn’t steal. He didn’t even fall. He shook violently then stopped.

I turned to my daughter-in-law. “Well, that didn’t work out,” I said. “Now what?”

Suddenly the whole nest started buzzing and as we looked down we saw a very big angry looking wasp starting to emerge.

She nodded neutrally.

“To run!”

Tracy Beckerman is the author of Amazon’s best-selling ‘Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love and Kibble’, available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit him at www.tracybeckerman.com.

Photo credit: Nature-Pix on Pixabay