Insecticide: How a Failure of Diplomacy Wiped Out an Entire Community

In the spring when I was cleaning the yard, I kicked up a low-lying wasp nest out behind the shed without realizing it at first. The wasps came in around my ankles, and I got stung pretty good (or pretty bad, or badly). Wasp stings can be so intense that the impact is first sort of incomprehensible, like suddenly running into an electrified barb-wire fence that was never there before. “This can’t be happening,” I say to myself, and then, ouch, yes it is happening, and I am doing the tribal dance of pain. I have some sensitivity to wasp stings as well. For several days my ankles swell into a painful imitation of exercise weights. I was seriously annoyed, but the truth was they were just doing what wasps do, and they weren’t really a problem otherwise. I wasn’t planning on going back there anytime soon, so I slathered on hydrocortisone and left them alone. After a couple of weeks, I could again walk like a human being instead of a two-legged pogo stick, and my outrage subsided into a comforting haze of live-and-let-live magnanimity.

This summer I had to work on the fence across the back, which wasn’t really in the range of the nest, but I had to walk within a couple feet of the wasps to get around them. I was a little apprehensive at first, but apparently I wasn’t a threat, and they left me alone. When I was almost done with the fence, however, I was picking up where I had been working, and suddenly the agonizing combination of sensations like sharpened lightning bolts hit me from behind. After days of ignoring me, apparently the capo wasp had suddenly decided to put out a hit on me, and without warning, the enforcers targeted the backs of my legs. This apparently unprovoked and unreasonable attack infuriated me. I had left them alone and given them their space, but they attacked me without mercy, the vicious little buzzards. I did what people do when they collide with the impersonal aggression of nature. I pulled out a can of insecticide and blasted the colony into oblivion.

Perhaps the wasps had legitimate concerns, at least in wasp terms. Perhaps in another reality we could have been sitting down with a couple of beers under a big umbrella, amiably chatting up our unjustified mutual paranoia. Perhaps we could have reached an accommodating agreement regarding our space and our right of way. Perhaps we would have found that our basic motivation was not so different, and that we shared fundamental ambivalence about our competing relationships with the unfamiliar and the unique.

Unfortunately, wasps are short on diplomacy and long on attack skills. While their needs may be uncomplicated and fundamental, their triggers are irrevocable and somewhat mysterious. As far as I can tell, they have little patience or appreciation for negotiation, and so for all intents and purposes, they quite decisively and carelessly commit themselves to heroic annihilation, and the truth is that I have a hard time feeling thoroughly bad about it.

Here’s Thinking for You.
Iffy