Tag: wasps

It annoys me to no end when people say animals are mean for no reason. One time I was talking to someone in class about groundhogs (I just think they’re cool) and this girl sitting next to us said “Groundhogs are actually really evil. There was one in my backyard with her babies and I walked towards them and the mom started hissing at me.” And it’s like …how does that make them evil. She was protecting her babies.

zoologicallyobsessed:

It’s amazing how little empathy people have towards animals and how little knowledge they have of animal behaviour. 

There’s so many people with comments like “Oh i was sleeping and it stung me for no reason!” like no dude, it was trapped in your room got frightened and stung you in your sleep, or landed on you and you rolled over or touched it while sleeping causing it to sting you or a million other reasons. 

Wasps don’t have the capability (that we know of) to go “I’m going to sting this person for zero reason cause I’m a wasp.” Animals don’t think or behave like that.

I’ve only been stung by a bee/wasp/etc once, and that was because I somehow got a bee in my shoe. Not shockingly, it didn’t like that. I’m actually not even sure it stung me on purpose- it was a honeybee, but there was no stinger in the sting. I think it might have scraped me with its stinger instead of actually stinging. Is it possible for that to raise a welt like a sting would? 

I’ve gotten up close to plenty of hives and nests, and if you move kinda calmly, you can usually get moderately close. Plus, if you watch them, they warn you that you’re too close. They buzz louder and move faster and clearly display that you gotta go. 

Stinging costs venom, energy, and risk. For a honeybee, it costs that worker’s life. They always, always have a reason to spend that energy, effort, and venom.

Finally, “evil” implies intentional malice. For something to be evil, it has to understand that it’s causing significant distress, and continue doing that, for no other reason than to cause distress. I can think of a very few animal species which are maybe, maybe intelligent enough to be capable of that, and most of them are things like cetaceans and elephants. Definitely not groundhogs or any sort of invertebrate. An animal can be needlessly aggressive if made to be by genetics or circumstance, but animals are incapable of evil.

red–thedragon:

djfalloutwolf:

lawful-evil-novelist:

jsands84:

conspiring-limabean:

blitzkriegfritz:

coolmanfromthepast:

i-have-no-gender-only-rage:

some info on bees and wasps 

I’ve been stung by a carpenter bee.  They’re usually pretty chill.

And dirt daubers are bros.  

It’s true you can pet Bumblebees

you can pet any of them if ur not a coward!!

My rational mind knows that cicada killers aren’t a threat but when they appear they legit terrify me until I remember that.

They are a burrowing breed so they do tend to appear out of nowhere. They’re just curious when they fly towards you tho. You’re in their territory and they wanna make sure you’re not a wasp

At a place that I go a lot me and my friends have to hide from fucking yellow jackets because THEY WILL COME AFTER ALL FOOD!

Man you just gotta be chill about them (note: i love yellowjacks so this is slightly biased)

But like you leave em a nice little sugar offering off to the side and dont jump too much when they land on you, and you dont let yourself get scared, and they really dont just attack if they can avoid it

The worst time i ever had with one was the time i had candy goo on my hands and it bit me thinking I was food. Nothing worse ever happened to me.

Although bees can smell fear, and it apparently causes them to attack, so that might be my own little ability to get along with em right there: I’m usually tol fascinated to be scared.

If you see those lil heaps of mud tubes on a wall with holes sometimes in one end, those are mud dauber nests. They build the tubes of mud, stuff caterpillars inside, lay an egg, and leave. Grubs hatch from eggs, eat caterpillars, grow up, and tunnel out. 

Paper wasps are the ones that build the paper-honeycomb nests where you can see all the tubes. The guy who invented paper got the idea from them. They’re pretty chill around humans as long as none of the humans nearby have done anything to them. If you see one starting to build a nest where you don’t want one, wait ‘till it leaves and remove the nest.

tbh there’s a wasp nest that grows every now and then but from my knowledge they’re mud daubers and those are not really know to be all that dangerous? should i just leave them be? am i good?

zoologicallyobsessed:

They’re usually non-territorial. If they aren’t bothering anyone, why touch them?

Mud daubers make mud nests that kind of look like a series of closed-off tubes stacked on each other. They put caterpillars in the tubes, lay an egg, and close the tube, and the larva stays inside until it’s an adult. If the tube is open, a wasp came out. 

They definitely aren’t territorial. They also spend very little time around the nest, the builder only comes back to lay more eggs and the adults vanish as soon as they come out. Unless you go up and grab one, they won’t sting you. You could safely stand by the nest and shout at it if you were so inclined.

curlicuecal:

ceekari:

curlicuecal:

moonsofavalon:

prokopetz:

thesallowbeldam:

momma-crow:

1petulantkitten:

1petulantkitten:

artistil:

weavemama:

BY A WHAT

THATS ALL THE BIG SCARIES IN ONE BUG TFFF
JU

Give it a dime, apparently.

Had to go research this thing, and the answer to what to do if it stings you is scream.

from Wikipedia-

“One researcher described the pain as “…immediate, excruciating, unrelenting pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations. In terms of scale, the wasp’s sting is rated near the top of the Schmidt sting pain index, second only to that of the bullet ant, and is described by Schmidt as “blinding, fierce [and] shockingly electric”.“

Soooooo…dissociate to escape or?

It’s laying eggs in you.

Let’s back up a second and fully appreciate that description.

The Schmidt sting pain index, a widely used classification system for the bites and stings of ants, bees and wasps, is literally the personal ranking system of a guy named Justin Schmidt, who goes around letting bugs sting him for science. Like, that’s this Thing as a scientist.

In one entry, he describes the sting of the common bee as “almost pleasant, [like] a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”

In another, the sting of the yellowjacket is described as “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.“

So when the Schmidt sting pain index characterises the sting of the tarantula hawk as “blinding, fierce [and] shockingly electric”, well, now you know what your standard for comparison is!

this is fascinating but when do we kinkshame Justin Schmidt

did I ever tell y’all about the time I caught a tarantula hawk in a tupperware

Unsure if brave or completely insane

after it got loose the first time I came back when it got done chasing me

What to do if you’re bitten? Laugh, it’s a wasp. They have a pretty good bite, but that’s like having a knife and deciding to poke somebody with the handle end. Also, maybe try not to be in biting range of a gigantic wasp.

What to do if you’re stung?

Scream+curse all you want. That’s it. Barring an allergy, the sting isn’t medically significant.

They’re not dangerous to humans, not really, they just hurt. 

Also, they aren’t at all aggressive. They run fast, but they fly slow and buzz loudly, and they have 0 interest in something that isn’t a tarantula. Mostly because they have no nest to defend and are fully aware that they’re intimidating. If you don’t grab one, it won’t sting you. 

So, unless you’re immune to pain, DON’T GRAB ONE. 

And it is /not/ laying eggs in you. It’s injecting a paralytic that’s intended to paralyze a tarantula so it can lay eggs in the tarantula, but, since you aren’t a tarantula or approximately the size of one, you’ll be fine. 

Source: weavemama