Comments

  1. Lauren Walker says

    I’m sure the neighbors see this as just another normal activity at the Myers’ household.

  2. Hemidactylus says

    When I was working with a grad student on her gopher tortoise project we saw more nicely done elliptical burrows in the ground. Several times her advisor came out with us/me instead and we scoped burrows. I was worried about crotalids no doubt and wore plastic chaps to protect me. No Doubt was a huge hit at the time as were the multiple spiders the plastic chaps funneled toward my shins and maybe made me permanently immune to multiple types of spider bite. I had welts.

    The stuff we saw on the cam was ok aside from flooded burrows. Gopher frogs. Shed snake skins. A tortoise here and there. No burrowing yellow jackets. I prefer my sand wasp renters in front of my front steps. I’d like to scope their burrows.

    I dealt with stinging wasps or hornets near my house before. No camera scope. Deadly effective spray that kills on contact. Sting my ear and you get the business I always say.

    PZ’s video recalls V/H/S series found footage horror from the start. That cannot end well given my experience watching such found footage. When I saw the first vespid I was screaming “Don’t do it PZ! Go back to your spiders!” Was your “Easy PZ!” quip at 1:43 intended to be ironic? At 3:27 it becomes a proper horror movie as we see multiple yellow jackets milling about the invading instrument. Fucking hell…

    It is cool to see the endoscopic footage you got then, but it seemed to veer onto horrific found footage territory. Wasp spray. Works.

    On the V/H/S scale I rate your video around 3.5/10. You survived though got bit. Ummm…that was predictable. On the Blair Witch scale it’s around 23.35/10. Yellow jackets suck!

  3. Tethys says

    I think a large cardboard box would work as a blind, but I would set up the endoscopic camera at night when the yellowjackets can’t see to defend the nest. Then you can get in the box and spy on them without fear of getting swarmed.

  4. bsr0 says

    I ran over one of those holes when I was a teenager mowing someone’s lawn. Got 3 stings on my leg, and then noticed two yellow-jackets hanging on to the shoelaces of my sneakers. The owner of the house thought I was doing some sort of rain dance up his back yard towards the house!

    We let things calm down, then the homeowner poured some used motor oil down the hole, followed by a couple shovels of dirt. Problem solved.

    I did watch out for those holes for the rest of that summer though.

  5. rabbitbrush says

    One October years ago, I was digging archaeological shovel probes in the woods. Unbeknownst to me, my shovel sliced right into a yellow jacket hole. Instantly yellow jackets swarmed out of the ground. Oh shit! I dropped the shovel and ran, but I got nailed. Unlike honey bees, those fµckers can sting multiple times, so if you get one up your pant leg, for instance….aiyaiyai. One of them stung my neck. When I got home hours later, I put ice on it. But by morning, I looked in the mirror; I had no neck! It was so swollen, there was no curve from my ears to my shoulders. In horror, I ran to the clinic across the street. The doctor treated it both as an allergic reaction and as an infection, because yellow jackets around here are also called “meat bees.” They love rotten meat, and not-rotten meat. He said I was lucky. That reaction could have cut off my breathing.

    The more stings you get over a lifetime, the worse the reaction gets, to the point of having to carry an epi-pen. I am extremely wary around yellow jackets. They are mean and angry and have no sense of humor.

    On the other hand, they are great pollinators in my garden.

  8. says

    I usually don’t kill creatures unless I can eat them, but I’ll make an exception for things with more venom than brain.
    Kill them with fire! Call Sigourney Weaver and tell her to bring the BIG flamethrower.

  13. timothyeisele says

    I have one of those “Bug Baffler” mesh shirts for exactly this sort of situation. I originally got it to keep me from being bitten by mosquitos and black flies, but I also use it when I open up my beehives or need to deal with a nest of angry wasps. It isn’t perfect protection against stings, but only because I don’t usually wear gloves with it, and so I pick up stings on my hands. They very rarely manage to actually sting through the mesh, and when the do it makes it so they can’t make a solid contact and so the sting is generally pretty minor. I highly recommend having one of these shirts, because You Never Know When You Will Need It.

  14. shelldigger says

    That hole looks a lot like an armadillo den. I don’t know if it is, or even if armadillos are that far north, but the woods, and some yards, in these parts (W Tn.) are riddled with holes like that.

    Obviously, if an armadillo is responsible for the hole, it’s long gone now…

    We had yellow jackets living in a hole in a tree by our back deck for a while. They moved on eventually. But those guys look pretty happy where they’re at.

  16. Tethys says

    @lasius and paulhutch

    It’s actually the Western Yellowjacket, which has the confusing binomial Vespula pensylvanica even though Pennsylvania is in the eastern US.

    Specifically, it closely resembles V. germanica. Though both species have a similar diamond-shaped black mark on the first tergum, V. pensylvanica can usually be differentiated by the continuous yellow ring (often referred to as an eye-loop) present around each eye.

    *wiki

    The eye-loop is clearly visible in the last few seconds of the video before PZ had to retreat.

  18. Tethys says

    @lasius

    It is far more likely that you will find North American species in North America. I already noted that they are very similar, but V. germanica isn’t found in Minnesota.

    At about 3:55 in the video you get a profile of the wasp head, and the yellow eye loop. It’s passing the camera on the right hand side of the burrow. The loop is not very visible from the top. Apparently the different castes of yellowjackets in the nest have slightly different patterns, though the wiki doesn’t have any illustrations of them.

  19. lasius says

    but V. germanica isn’t found in Minnesota.

    Yes it is: https://bugguide.net/node/view/14083/data

    On the contrary, V. pennsylvanica isn’t: https://bugguide.net/node/view/12981/data

    At about 3:55 in the video you get a profile of the wasp head, and the yellow eye loop. It’s passing the camera on the right hand side of the burrow. The loop is not very visible from the top.

    I don’t see it. V. germanica has yellow behind the eyes too. It’s only the yellow bar seperating the top of the eyes from the black forehead that distinguishes the two patterns, and I frankly do not see it here. So I am still unconvinced.

    Apparently the different castes of yellowjackets in the nest have slightly different patterns, though the wiki doesn’t have any illustrations of them.

    There are no different castes among workers in yellowjackets.

  20. Tethys says

    @lasius

    It’s silly to insist that PZ has a colony of European yellowjackets nesting in his Minnesota yard, regardless of your beliefs. They are a native species, which rather rules out V. germanica.

    No idea where you got the idea that there are different castes of workers. Queens, drones, workers, larvae are the usual castes in colonial species.

  22. lasius says

    @Tethys

    You do realize that V. germanica is an invasive species in North America and has been well-established in Minnesota by now, right?

  23. Tethys says

    @lasius

    There are documented instances of V. germanica in and around New York, but you will have to provide a citation for them being found anywhere else in NA. That’s a very long way from Minnesota, and our extremely harsh winters kill off most invasive species. Sadly, this doesn’t include the invasive beetle species that I’ve been battling all summer. Viburnum beetles are evil.

  24. lasius says

    I already posted a link earlier where people posted pictures of V. germanica they took in Minnesota.

    https://bugguide.net/node/view/14083/data

    Otherwise have this: https://jhr.pensoft.net/article/1606/

    Vespula germanica has been unintentionally introduced into temperate regions worldwide. It apparently first appeared in Montreal in the 1960’s and other parts of eastern North America in the 1970’s, although there is a record of the species collected in Ithaca, New York in 1891 (Menke and Snelling 1975). The species reached California by 1989.

  25. Tethys says

    Oy, PZ could you please attempt a good pic of the facial eye loop markings so the ant stops insisting that it’s a European species rather than the native Western Yellowjacket.

    Parsimony, it’s a thing. Minnesota is nowhere near California, or the east coast. PZ is almost in the dead center of the North American continent, which is in North Dakota.

  26. lasius says

    Yeah, but this wasp does not have the “eye loop”, it looks like V. germanica. And V. germanica has been recorded in Minnesota.

    https://bugguide.net/node/view/2031824/bgimage

    Also they reached California on the land route across the continent, and they occur further north in Canada as well.

    That’s enough parsimony for me.