re: Giant yellow jacket nests found

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when I was about 10 I was playing football w/some guys and the ball rolled into some bushes. A guy went in the bushes to get it and ran out screaming a few seconds later. He had disturbed a yellow jacket nest.

I ended up getting stung 7 or 8 times and it hurt like hell, but the other guy got stung around 75 times and ended up having to go to the emergency room.

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I was working road construction one summer in college and was clearing out an old barbed wire fence. It was all grown up to hell and back with brush. As I reached in and snipped one of the wires I felt this searing pain on my left forearm - I assumed that when I cut the fence it was under tension and when cut it had wrapped itself around my arm ... I was wrong, so very wrong.

Pulled my arm back to remove the rusty wire from in my skin. As I did I caught a glimpse of a large hornet nest that had been torn apart by the cut wire ... I quickly looked at my left arm and it was like something out of a saw movie. My arm was covered with dozens of those frickers who were stinging me like I owed them money.

I slapped at my arm, brushed off all that I could see, and started flailing and running around like a crazed orangutan. The guy operating the bush hog heard my cursing over the engine noise and drove over to see wtf was going on. When he got to me he took one look and said, “buddy, I think you might need to go to the ER.” My arm was swollen up like a steroid addicted bodybuilder by the time we got to the hospital. Took me a week before I went back to work.

As if that was 'found'. They watched it grow, and it wasn't overnight.

I had forgotten about that guy.

Fun thing about yellow jackets, by the end of summer they're primarily looking for the most energy dense stuff they can find. Sugar preferred, which often is in the form of rotting and fermenting fruit.

So they get drunk which somehow leads to them being more aggressive.

I got nailed a few times this evening cutting the grass. Went back with some wasp spray and laid waste. One of them didn’t get a direct hit and was suffering for a long time before dying. I sat there and watched the whole thing laughing like a movie villain

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I remember encountering one of these when I was a kid. It was about 10 ft. up on a tree branch on a road where quite a few people in the neighborhood walked past. I thought I'd be the hero and knock it down with a rock. I was wrong

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Lol.

Same thing happened to me. I hit that shite with a rock, stood watching, and got hit like 5-6 times in the face. Little frickers

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Nests that big don't happen overnight. That's a couple of weeks (at least) worth of work.

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According to the article they are “perennial” nests, meaning the colony didn’t die off over winter. Presumably because it didn’t get cold enough, nest was in just the right location, abundant food supply, something along those lines.

Apparently when this happens, the queens don’t disperse when they hatch in springtime. So the nest population explodes.

When I was a teenager I ran over a YJ nest with the riding mower and when they hit me a couple times all at once I straight up jumped off the mower and took off running.. but left the mower in gear. Had to go chase it down and turn it off really quick

Of all of the satisfying ways off destroying a ground nest, molten aluminum takes the cake

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