Rally ‘round the Black Flag!

First COVID. Then no baseball. Too many hogs. Not enough TP. And now, murder hornets.

Just when we’re thinking it might almost be safe to step outdoors comes word that hornets the size of small airplanes carrying a load of venom capable of dissolving human flesh have nested on the American continent and may be poised to spread among us.

They’re Asian Giant Hornets, and in their native Japan, every year hornet stings kill four times as many people as gunshots. They may prove to be the least welcome Japanese import since karaoke.

Ok, maybe they’re not the size of a single-engine Cessna, but still, a few thousand ill-tempered two-inch flying hypodermic needles aren’t the stuff of a Welcome Wagon visit in any neighborhood. This bug is to our run-of-the-mill yellow jacket what COVID is to the sniffles. It’s a critter right out of Jurassic Park, sort of a T. Rex of the insect world. They eat honeybees by the hiveful and sting the living bejeezuz out of anything or anybody that gets them annoyed. So far they’ve set up shop in northwestern Washington state, but if you’re about to draw a measure of reassurance from the remoteness of that location remember, the first COVID case was in Seattle.

Fortunately for all of us with tender skin the authorities up in the Nortwest have mounted a full-scale, high-tech search-and-destroy for these nasty buggers. Now as a rule I try to be a friend to all God’s creatures, but, there’s an exception to every rule and if a bee-eating, me stinging, hostile swarm of oversized devil bugs doesn’t make for an exception, I don’t know what does.

Besides, as soon as any of those Vespa-sized Vespidae pick up a change of address form I haven’t the slightest doubt they’ll be making a bee line for my home coordinates.

For some reason skinny, buzzy, stingy thins seem to be attracted to me, or at least to the places I frequent. From the first unseasonably seasonable days of March until well after a killing frost has nothing left to kill I routinely find random wasp corpses on my windowsills or spot one or two live and frustrated bumping heads with a wall or window pane. I have gray waspy pancakes growing in every gable, papery waspy refuges hidden behind my shutters and busy, buzzy yellow jacket tunnels mine-fielding the back yard.

It’s not like I’m trying to roll out some entomological welcome mat. With regularity I serve the six-legged squatters with a chemical eviction notice and the individuals who invite themselves into my living quarters are greeted with a hand-held high-voltage bug zapper that sends them off to perdition with a satisfying snap! crackle! and pop! blue sparks and a whiff of smoke. But season after season they keep coming back, doing their Darwinian best to prove themselves the fittest..

Yeah, I know, the greenest of the green will be quick to remonstrate that those flying pain-sticks serve a valuable ecological purpose – eating stuff we’d rather not have around and making the world a better and happier place. At least that’s what they say until they pull on a sneaker after a Vespidae has taken up residence in the toe. I’ve yet to see the most organic among us voluntarily share a living space with a hornet’s nest. Let’s face it, social distancing from unsocial insects has long been the order of the day.

And our native and long assimilated species provide more than ample nasty winged diversity. If the President is serious getting rid of unwanted border crossers Vespa mandarinia would be a good place to start.

In the meantime, let’s rally ‘round the Black Flag, boys! Rally ‘round the Black Flag!