In The News

I very much dislike our wasps here in the UK. For those not sure which wasps I mean, it’s the yellow and black social wasps, which can sting and that go around killing nice bees and things, which I don’t like.

I have read about wasps to try and educate myself more about where they fit into ecosystems etc, as I am very much a fan of nature in general, and I rarely hate an entire animal species. I have not so far found anything to change my mind though...

For those people who say that wasps don’t sting much, or that the stings aren’t too bad, I still have a scar on my hand from a wasp sting that I got when I was about 12 years old. My whole hand swelled up and painful for a good week, and the scar remains. The wasp was on some litter that I picked up as I was part of a clean-up party after our local carnival, so you may well point out that it wouldn’t have stung me if it hadn’t felt threatened… But! The second time I got stung I was simply out running, and a wasp stung me on the back of my leg. In this case my entire leg swelled up, so much so that my skin blistered with the excess fluid, and I ended up getting cellulitis from it too. So, I do hate wasps, and I am scared of them. Yukky Yukky Yuk.

So it was with horrified fascination that I clicked on this BBC News story to see what had happened.

Here is the story that greeted me once I had clicked:

And despite my horror at the size of that nest, and the thought of all those wasps being in someone’s actual home, I couldn’t help noticing that poor crochet blanket that had been unashamedly claimed by those horrible insects!

Imagine my relief when I read further down that the wonderful pest control man had saved the blanket :)   And what a lovely journalist to realise that such a detail was indeed newsworthy!