Mowing and Yellowjackets

 Mowing and Yellowjackets

By Bobby Neal Winters

As those of you who labor behind the mechanical beasts known as lawn mowers are fully aware, this season has been more strenuous than average.  For those who don’t, let me explain.  All God-fearing mowers--and I am more afraid with each passing day--begin the season on a weekly rotation. (I say weekly rotation, and most of us mean seven days, but there are those who mow every eighth day and eliminate a whole mowing after seven repetitions by this numerical sleight of hand, but let’s not go too far out into the weeds.)

After a while, as the spring rains subside, we can make the shift to mowing every other week. (I tried to write bi-weekly, but does that mean every two weeks or twice a week. God forbid!) That took longer than normal this year.  Typically the last time we have to mow every two weeks is around the first of July, when rain becomes a fable.  This year, by way of contrast, I remained in my two-week cycle until August.  

Quite frankly, I was only able to go from early August until early September without mowing because I simply didn’t have time to. In any case, it has been an unusual mowing year.

And then came the Yellowjackets.

No, I haven’t been stung, and I shall endeavor not to be, but my sweet wife has.  She has been painting some trim on the exterior of the house.  At one moment, she noted some Yellowjackets keeping her company; in the next moment she’d been stung five times.

She is the sturdy one from our family.  Five stings would’ve put any of the rest of us in the hospital.

The Yellowjackets are a particularly nasty member of the order hymenoptera.  I’ve seen them referred to as [redacted] with wings, where the redacted word is the plural of a rude term for the anal sphincter. They are very territorial. Bees will only bother you if you bother them; I’ve actually seen my wife pet a bumblebee.  Yellowjackets are proactive.  If they think that you might eventually think about bothering them, they are on you.  Bees make honey; Yellowjackets make misery.

You may have noticed I am capitalizing Yellowjacket.  I am afraid not to.  I am afraid of not showing them sufficient respect.

My wife went into defense mode because she wanted to finish her painting.  She put together a Yellowjacket trap that she found online.  It consisted of a milk jug, soapy water, and a strip of salami on a string.  Yellowjackets perished in it by the thousands...and still they came.  It was like watching one of the more over-the-top zombie movies.

This is my wife, the butterfly lady.  She has a butterfly larva she is fostering right now. She loves living creatures, and they love her.

But the Yellowjackets.

She escalated her effort through several levels of chemical warfare, until she thought the numbers were sufficiently diminished for her to continue painting in peace.

No.

They got her again.

This time on her arm.  From one side, she looks like Popeye. 

The territory was yielded to the Yellowjackets.  

What does this have to do with mowing?  If you walk by my house, and look into the back yard, you will be able to see approximately where the Yellowjackets are.  Their territory is unmown. We’ve yielded them 100 square feet of the state of Kansas as theirs until the winter freeze takes them. 

We are told they will not use the same nests next year.

We shall see.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )