Crazy Work!

I was visiting my dad last weekend and he mentioned that there was a yellow jacket's nest up in the tree and pointed it out.  He said that somebody was coming out to take it down later.  It wasn't a huge nest (actually, there were two of them - one about the size of a soccer ball and the other the size of an orange) but it was big enough to be dangerous.  I find it interesting how there are a lot of people who are deathly afraid of snakes or spiders - even here in the Northwest where dangerous ones are virtually non-existent - but they scoff at me for my phobia of wasp-like creatures (wasps, yellow-jackets, hornets, bees, etc.).  At least my phobia is rationally founded because more people are killed or hospitalized due to getting into nests of these than from any other "terrifying" creatures.  As many times as I have gotten into nests, I really should have such an aversion.  A few years ago, I got into three nests in one summer.  Miraculously, I only got stung twice, but I probably wouldn't have gotten stung at all if I weren't trying to rescue my granddaughter from the swarm.  If you want to see a person who possesses superhuman powers, just observe me as I get into a nest of yellow jackets.  My son (who was my hiking companion when we stepped on a nest in the forest) explained that it was some of the most amazing parkour that he has ever seen as I leaped through bushes, over stumps and down a hill to get away... leaving him behind to get stung three times.  I'm such a hero.  I don't remember much about that incident.  It's all a blur to me.

So after enjoying the day with my family at my dad's birthday party, a man shows up to the house and my dad says, "this must be the exterminator!"  Well, he wasn't an exterminator at all.  In fact, he captured the yellow jackets live.  I was fascinated by the means of how he was to go about doing this, so I watched the whole process.  It was actually rather low-tech... something that I might have thought of.  As he was preparing to get the yellow jackets down, I asked him why he was doing that.  He explained that there are labs that extract the venom from the insects to use as anti-venom for those who get stung.  He was dressed in thick coveralls, but nothing really unusual.  I asked him if he ever gets stung.  He grinned like a little boy as he chomped his chewing gum - "All the time... in fact, I got stung today" as he pointed to a spot on his forearm.  It was just business as usual.  Apparently, the labs must pay him a lot for what he provides or maybe he just gets a thrill out of it.

it was quite a stretch to the top nest

He set up a stepladder (that wasn't nearly tall enough) and attached a vacuum cleaner to it.  I know this works because I have tried it. I thought I was pretty clever with my little contraption, but apparently I wasn't the only one... nor the first.  I have a couple of videos of when I sucked up some yellow jackets.  Had I known they were worth money, I would have done something to save them, rather than emptying a can of raid into the Shop-Vac.  You can see my videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaRuiaAloA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFl1T8tD3do  The man had a long tube attached to the vacuum cleaner, kind of like the one I have in my videos.  The whole operation seemed somewhat makeshift, but I suppose that anybody in that line of crazy work would have to fabricate their own equipment.

his yield: two or three dozen yellow jackets

He put on some thick rubber gloves and a beekeepers screened hood and climbed the ladder and went to work.  The vacuum cleaner was gas powered, so he wouldn't have to worry about dragging cords out in the woods with him.  He calmly went about shoving the vacuum cleaner tube up into the nests, sucking out all the yellow jackets.  The upper nest was quite a few feet higher, so he stepped onto the top step of the ladder to reach it.  When he had sufficiently vacuumed out all the yellow jackets, he pulled the hose out of the vacuum cleaner and tied up what looked like a sock over the hole where the hose came out of.  He then pulled out a screened chamber that housed all the yellow jackets.  He brought them over and showed them to me.  There weren't a whole lot of them, but he explained that it appeared that a raccoon had gotten into the nest and had  eaten a lot of the larvae and possibly taken out the queen, and the yellow jackets that remained just repaired the nest and kept maintaining what was left.  There were a few dozen yellow jackets in the screened housing.  I asked him if it was worth coming out here for and he just grinned and said, "probably not... but I did see a nest on the way here so it was worth the trip. It's all in a day's work."  I did give him a tip though.  I told him about the huge nest that was on Marine Drive.  He said he would go out there and take a look at it.  When I told him it was hanging on a transformer, he told me that he would probably have to knock it down with a board and have somebody on the ground catch it.  He related how once he was doing this and his partner was supposed to catch the nest, but it only got halfway into the bucket and the rest spilled onto the roadway.  He chuckled as he exclaimed, "What am mess that was!"

I asked him what he was going to do next with the yellow jackets and he told me that his wife was ready in the van with some dry ice and was going to "knock them out" before delivering them to the lab.  I didn't ask how the lab was going to extract the venom from the yellow jackets, but I imagine that is an interesting process as well.  I just shook my head as he was putting his things away and said, "I know that's not something I would want to do for work, but I am glad that you are willing to do it. That's crazy work!"  He chuckled once again as he loaded the last of his equipment into his van and took off... thanking us for being able to take the yellow jackets away.