Wasps and Weirdos
When I got home from a two-week road trip, there were five wasps living in my bathroom. Not the red ones, that aggressively protect their territory and sting in gangs. But the brown ones, that are rather passive, and pretty much keep to themselves, if you’ll let them.
When my husband and I first moved to Arkansas, we usually drank our morning coffee while sitting in plastic chairs on the tiny porch of our temporary trailer home, with our knees only inches from the railing. Brown wasps had more than one nest on the railing, and most of them were at home that time of day—but they never bothered us. So we didn’t bother them. And after a week or two of sharing the porch space during java time—they moved. They all abandoned their nests, leaving the porch to the humans.
So I wasn’t too alarmed by the brown wasps in my bathroom. They mostly crawled up and down the lace curtain covering the window. I left the bathroom door ajar thinking they might fly out the way they came in, but they didn’t. On my third day home, one flew into my bedroom and landed on the flat woodwork, where I was able to capture him in a jar and release him to the outdoors. He was fatigued. It took him twelve hours to come out of the jar once I’d put it out on the balcony.
The following evening, one of the remaining wasps buzzed toward my head when I went in to brush my teeth. It startled me, and I left abruptly – turning out the light and closing the bathroom door behind me so the frazzled creature wouldn’t follow me to my bed in this agitated state. But I wondered if this frantic buzzing was a plea for help. A desperate attempt for some interspecies aid.
Of course, it could have been anger, although I’d done nothing alarming up to that point. Unless I was perceived as a kidnapper—for catching (and releasing) one of their group.
In the morning I opened the bathroom door: Two dead, in the bathtub. One missing—probably dead on the window ledge beyond my view. One was still climbing on the curtain. Presumably the feisty one. Finally, the little brown insect sat on the window screen—a sturdy enough surface for me to cover him with a glass jar and slip a fly swatter beneath his feet. I carried this survivor to the balcony and set the jar in the soil of a potted Norfolk pine. He came out of the jar pretty quickly but wandered the flowerpot soil for a time.
I know I’m the weirdo here. Most people would kill the wasps as soon as they were discovered—for fear of being stung while sitting on the commode. (I visited that very toilet more than once a day with no harm to wasps or humans.) And I can’t help but wonder if the gut reaction to kill the beasts, is related to the apparently human notion to keep outsiders at bay. To keep “others” – those who don’t look like us or talk like us – from getting too close. Afraid they will hurt us—when, probably, they’re just looking to live peaceably – like most human beings.
Had these wasps been in attack mode, I Iikely would have reacted differently. But my pacifist parents didn’t raise me to “shoot first and ask questions later.” Maybe that’s weird. And maybe my folks got stung more frequently than others. But I don’t think so—on either count.