OT: scary

Snip..

Sounds like osage orange to me.. Green knobby fruit bigger than a baseball, super sticky sap in them? If you open them up they look like some sort of citrus fruit but they don't seem to be edible, I know I'd be mighty hungry before I tried to eat an osage orange.

In my neck of the woods the helpful hillbillies all say "Them will keep the spiders out of your drawers".. I never had spiders in my drawers so I don't worry about it.

John

I last killed ants in the home with a 300 watt photographic bulb in a plain aluminum clamp on fixture. They cook really fast with the light aimed near them. Strobes didn't seem as effective, even when focused on them.

Fresh out of high school in '71, I moved to Phoenix for tech school. The roaches in my Adams Avenue home were 3" deep on any plate left on the floor. After talking with local restaurant owners, I got a gallon of Indianhead roach killer which was safe(r) to spray in kitchens and around the baseboards inside. 2 applications did the trick over the course of a month. Company may have gone OOB in 1991.

--- Annoy a politician: Be trustworthy, faithful, and honest! ---

I'm cleaning a beverage off of my monitor!

| | Snip.. | | > I've never seen this done anywhere else, but there was a female (?) oak | > tree in town that would drop these knarly apple thing (oak apples, I was | > told) and my mother would get a box full every year, section them, and put | > them in closets and such. The roaches stayed away, for some reason, and any | > more than that I don't know. Maybe someone else has heard of this or can | > fill in the blanks of how this works. | >

| | Sounds like osage orange to me.. Green knobby fruit bigger than a | baseball, super sticky sap in them? If you open them up they look like | some sort of citrus fruit but they don't seem to be edible, I know I'd | be mighty hungry before I tried to eat an osage orange. | | In my neck of the woods the helpful hillbillies all say "Them will keep | the spiders out of your drawers".. I never had spiders in my drawers so | I don't worry about it. | | John

Hmmm.. Had an osage orange tree in the backyard (we called it Beau d'arc, as my mother was old school and cajun. Took me years to get the real name!) and it didn't put anything out but painful spines. The donor certainly looked like an oak tree, but your description of the apple is right on. Now I'm having to go to the web and check out what's up. There goes one more mystery from my youth!

Well, this was probably 10 years ago, and my memory is just a bit vague about the minute details. But, I THINK they were black and yellow striped guys. Are those yellow jackets, bees, or what? I know I used to see "bumblebees" that were very large furry guys, about 2-3 times the size of the insects in question. So, the term "yellowjacket" applies to the black and yellow wasps, but NOT to the ordinary honeybee?

Jon

The "changing of the drawers" frequency probably comes into play, here.

R, Tom Q.

Yellow jackets are wasps. There are hornets that look similar. There are many black and yellow stinging insects that look similar. Generally, bees are the hairy ones, wasps/hornets are smooth and shiny.

The same around here though I usually hear the fruit called "horse apples". I don't have a clue why since I've never seen anything that would eat them.

Wayne Cook Shamrock, TX

Correct. Yellowjackets are wasps - forever and always!

If you get close look at them, the most obvious sign that it isn't a bee is that it has no "hair" - All "flavors" of bees that I'm aware of are "fuzzy" to some extent. With one exception that I'm aware of (The mis-named "Velvet Ant", which is actually a wasp - and thankfully, is pretty uncommon here in the US) *NONE* of the vespids (Wasps) are fuzzy

- They're smooth, and usually shiny.

Black and yellow-to-orange stripes with fuzz could be any of several strains of honeybee, including the so-called "killer" bees. The "economy size" version are almost certainly some variation on the "Bombus" (bumblebees and relatives such as Mason and Carpenter bees) genus.

Black and yellow stripes and no fuzz = some form of vespid - AKA wasp, probably Yellowjackets - AKA "Meat bees" in some parts of the country - if they don't have an obvious "wasp-waist", more likely a variety of paper wasp if they do.

Then there's the hornets - Generally they come in patterns of black and white or light and dark grey.

Another difference: Individual bees (other than the small handful of so-called "stingless" bees, which, for obvious reasons, don't sting at all) sting you *EXACTLY ONE TIME* before they fly off to die.

Individual wasps can and do "play sewing machine" up your arm, stinging over and over again (although USUALLY after the first two or three times they hit you, they're out of venom, so suceeding stings are "blanks" - little more than a pinprick, which might not even be felt) as do hornets.

Ah, the joys of milk coming out of your nose !!

And the yellow jackets also eat meat -- they will take a chunk out of you like a deer fly then sting you multiple times when you dare to object to getting eaten. In general, honey bees are quite docile (we used to have 4 hives in the back yard when we were part of the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association). The biggest problem we faced is with the "anything that stings me must be a bee, you have bees, so I am going to get stung". What most people get stung with is some member of the wasp family, but then they blame all "bees" (as defined above). When you are BBQing, it is the wasps/yellow jackets that show up to help you (unless you are using honey on the meat then honey bees start sniffing around too). The only ones that "swarm" are the honey bees - this is the natural reproduction of the colony (they split with the old queen, leaving a new one behind). They are very seldom at all aggressive when in a swarm (but they can scare the daylights out of people when they find them !!)

mikey

true. bees have thier hive, ususlly away from their feeding areas. Wasps have their nests close to their feeding areas, where other insects are. BAD sentence, I apoligize. The upshot is don't look or act like food or competition. Benign indifferance followed with a gentle wave away works often. If they persist, ther is probably bait nearby. Neat bugs, as are spiders, and many ants, etc.

wws

I always called it the "brain tree." We had one in the park near where I grew up in Fort Worth. Sadly, they dredged the creek by the tree once and ripped the roots up badly enough to kill it. And, yeah, I've also got no idea what would eat that crap.

I thought "hornets" were the big-assed red guys that look like wasps on steroids? I got "punched" by a few when I was young. They'd get in front of me, kind of weaving back and forth a bit, then fly at my face or chest at full throttle, crash, and bounce off. Not stinging, just ramming. Maybe that's why I don't see those things around any more--too friggin' stupid. But, man, when they do sting it feels like you got beat in that spot with a bat for three days.

A few years ago during a summer barbeque I had a rather persistent yellowjacket wasp that was very fond of my corn (on the cob - covered with butter and salt, of course). I had a loose kernel that he flew off with, but then he would come back. After a few rounds of this I kept a loose kernel on top and timed him - his round trip time was two and half minutes, plus of minus ten seconds. He kept this behavior going until dinner was over..

They are pretty common here (Western Oregon), and I've found that if I ignore them they don't do any harm.

Jon

Yep.

Yep - I work my two hives in literally T-shirt and blue-jeans. I've fired up my smoker about three times, I think - Simply haven't had any need for any more "protection". I've only rarely been stung, and the few times it has happened, it was due to my own mis-handling of frames, covers, etc, and the resulting (and *COMPLETELY* understandable) "Oh my god, I'm being attacked! Sting! Alert the rest of the hive!" reaction of a mistreated bee.

Yep, precisely. Which is why I jumped in on the tale of the "swarm of yellowjackets". There is no such thing, and such mis-information is one of the worst PR problems beekeepers, whether amateur or commercial, have to face.

I hived my first swarm - roughly basketball sized, with plenty of fliers out to several hundred feet - by literally walking up to the cluster in "regular street clothes", clipping the twig it was hanging on, and carryng it over to a hive that I had just sitting there waiting for some bees to populate it - plans were to mooch a couple-few pounds of bees and a queen from a nearby beekeeper, but I hadn't gotten around to actually doing it yet. Ended up not needing to. :)

The bees I got may even have been from one of that beekeeper's hives, but there's an unwritten law understood by folks involved with 'em: "A swarm of bees is the property of whoever picks it off of wherever it has settled and puts it in a hive", and to my knowledge, that's a rule that's never violated by any but the most reprehensible lowlife scumbags.

Anyway, back to my point... When they're in "swarm mode", honeybees care about *EXACTLY* one thing: "Find a new home". In that condition, the only way they'll sting is if sorely abused (Kids throwing rocks at the cluster, misinformed folks swatting at them, and similar) and even then, it usually takes some persistence on the part of the "victim" to get them to do more than buzz around a bit. For honeybees, stinging is a last-ditch "protect self/hive" action, and since there is no hive to protect, there is no instinct to sting unless they have reason to feel that they're in danger of dying.

You just described a velvet ant perfectly.

I got "punched" by a few when I was young. They'd get in

Count yourself lucky... those things have been known to kill humans with a sting. They've got an *EXTREMELY* vicious venom that's chemically and functionally similar to cobra venom - it's a nasty neurotoxin that can shut down breathing and heartbeat if not treated quickly - and they deliver (comparatively speaking) a HUGE dose of it when they sting. Fortunately, they tend to be difficult to prod into stinging unless you really work at it.

But after you get stung several times your sense of ecological balance seems to disappear!

DOC

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