Mary Welch Steinhoff Archives

October 9, 2014October 10, 2014

Yellow Jacket Wars

Here’s the tale of our yellow jacket woes as told in email and Facebook posts to friends and family over the last couple of days.

Oct. 7, 2014, at 2:45 p.m. – Mother got nailed twice while pulling vines off the back of the house. I went into the same general area to load up some firewood and got stung once on the arm. The culprits were yellow jackets. You might think they are bees, but they have skinny waists and they can sting more than once. I think they are in some sandbags we have old kindling in.

I sprayed the area with some magic bug killer, but that just got them stirred up.

Last night, I went out after dark with a flashlight after everybody must have gone to sleep and started pulling the area apart with a hoe. When I felt something hit my beard, I beat a hasty retreat indoors and saw one on my shirt winding up to nail me. I brushed him off and watched him buzz around the room while I searched for a can of bug spray.

I dug one out of my car and went back to battle. I finally spotted the guy and gave him a good blast, but didn’t see him fall. After waiting a few minutes, I figured he had passed on to his just reward.

This guy will NOT give up

About two hours later, I saw something whiz by my ear and start flying around the desk lamp. I waited until he got to a clear spot and I really let him have it this time. I don’t know whether he was poisoned or drowned, but he stopped moving.

We’ll give the nest another crack tonight.

[Note: it’s not easy to shoot yellow jackets buzzing around. The best I can do is point the camera in their general direction and fire away when I see one go by. The autofocus isn’t picking up on something as small as an insect, so the few I DID capture were fuzzy. On top of that, I’m paranoid every time I see something moving in my peripheral vision, I flinch and start swiveling my head around. You wouldn’t believe how many tiny bugs and mosquitoes there are in the air. And dust specks. You can click on the photos to make them larger, but nothing is going to improve this one.]

Oct. 7, 2014, at 3:06 p.m. – Helpful hint from a Facebook friend: Wait till after midnight and add kerosene to the hole. Use a full gallon and then let soak for 60 minutes, then add another gallon and light. Bees be gone.

Oct 7, 2014, at 3:12 p.m. – My yellow jackets are against the house. I don’t think Mother would like it if I burned down her house to get rid of theirs.

Oct 7, 2014, at 3:32 p.m. – Another helpful hint from Facebook: Ken, use a lighter, the long one, like you used on a grill

Oct 7, 2014, at 3:34 p.m. – Lighting it isn’t a problem. Putting it out might be.

I found the nest

Oct 7, 2014, at 7:39 p.m. – I found the nest. I waited until after dark until there was no activity (well, there was one guy, but I gave him a blast of bug spray and he spiraled down to the ground. I tried not to gloat.).

I pulled two sandbags of kindling out into the yard with no results, but when I yanked a third one out, I exposed the hive and they were none too happy. I made a dash back to the house and got the door closed just as a couple of them were smashing against the glass.

I’ll wait until just before I go to bed and wash the hive down with spray if there aren’t any buzzing around.

How does Wyatt Earp do it?

Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 9:44 p.m. – After watching the second half of Tombstone, a cowboy shoot-em-up movie, with Mother, I went downstairs the check the yellow jackets. I must have carried one inside with me, because he was buzzing around the desk lamp.

Unfortunately, in my hasty retreat earlier, I left the flying insect spray outside. By the time I stuck my head outside to grab it, he was hiding.

I went outside and saw I had split the hive into two pieces and both were covered with bugs. I sprayed them both down until I ran out of kill juice and made a beeline back inside.

I’m sitting at the computer watching for movement out of my peripheral vision and hoping I remember how Wyatt Earp did that quick-draw thing.

Oct 7, 2014, at 9:46 p.m. – I stuck my head outside again. I think I may have won the skirmish. Nothing was in the air (although a cricket by the door frame took a year off my life).

The sizable hive had bunches of dead critters on it and none flying combat air patrol over it.

The guy in the basement must still be here somewhere. My head is still swiveling around and the bug spray is locked and loaded if he shows up. I’m full dressed in a long-sleeve shirt, jeans, socks and a cap. I was wearing gloves up until a few minutes ago.

After I took the gloves off, a mosquito bit me on the back of my hand.

Layers like pancakes

Oct. 8, 2014, at 10:04 a.m. – I got my first good look at the hive this morning. It’s pretty good size. It was built between the dirt and a sandbag. The spray killed a substantial number of the critters, but there are enough buzzing around in the air that I’m going to leave it alone until after dark.

I thought the hive was in two pieces, but the bulk of it is stuck to the bottom of a sandbag. I don’t see any movement ON the hive, but there are a dozen or so yellow jackets orbiting the area. I’ll let them settle down until after dark.

Oct. 8, 2014, at 9:05 p.m. – Went out with rake and pulled sandbags out into the yard. When I got a closer look at the hive, it appeared to be made up of multiple pancake-sized nests. I pulled apart some of the “pancakes” and thought I saw movement, so I blasted it and the area where I saw the activity this afternoon. Maybe it’ll all be over by morning.

What’s with Cape and stinging insects? I got nailed by a bee when I tried to shoot the destruction of Franklin School in 2012.

September 14, 2014

Pursuing the Wild Pine Cone

The temps in Cape have gotten low enough for enough days that the concrete basement walls are starting to radiate cold. Mother lit the first fire of the season this morning.

I was editing photos all day, so I didn’t know that it had eventually gotten nice outside. The temperatures were mild and there was no wind. I told Mother is was a perfect time to replenish her pine cone supply. (I mentioned last winter how well pine cones work as fire starters.

When we cruised by Jackson City Park earlier in the week, we saw a couple of our regular trees were dropping cones, but they were a lot smaller than last year.

Like an Easter egg hunt

We found a tree down near the river that filled two five-gallon buckets in about 20 minutes. Then, we went looking for a park Brother Mark thought might have some trees. We pulled into a parking spot and hit the mother lode. I started filling my bucket again when I noticed Mother wasn’t in the van.

She didn’t want to be left out of the fun, so she had snatched a bag and a grabber and started working the tree on the other side of the parking spot.

The grabber she’s using is similar to this one on Amazon, but available locally for not much more.

Two 13-gallon bags full

In not more than 20 or 30 minutes of actual picking, we managed to fill two 13-gallon trash bags with fire starters. Based on the number of cones high up in the trees, it looks like there will plenty to last the winter.

I was using a new grabber. I was in Ace Hardware to pick up some odds and ends when I saw a bright yellow whatsit that looked interesting until I saw an $18.99 price tag on it. Then I looked again and it was marked down to either $3.99 or $4.99. The one Mother is using has rubber grippers that would make it better for picking up things off top shelves and doesn’t require as much force to use.

My fancy yellow one would pick up two or three cones at a time and has magnets in the end (which didn’t help with pine cones). It also had an annoying squeak that silicone spray should fix.

September 8, 2014

Growing Things Fear Him

When I travel across the country, my van is loaded with cameras, tripods, computers, electronic gizmos and navigational aides. When Brother David hits the road, he carries such implements of destruction that trees and bushes shrink back in horror as he goes by.

Mother passed on certain traits to each of us. I got her desire to explore new roads and to marvel at the power of storms. David, on the other hand, inherited her desire to attack green, growing things and shorten them to within an inch of their lives (or more).

The sun had scarcely started to think about waking up roosters when he brought out a hedge trimmer that could chop down walnut trees and a blower so powerful that he has to put rocks in his pockets to keep from being blown backward. The only thing that makes more noise than the blower is his snoring in the middle of the night. He was sleeping on the porch (“cause it’s nice and cool”) with the door closed and I was in the basement trying to finish a blog post when I started having problems with my monitors vibrating. I traced the disturbance to my brother creating low-frequency, but powerful sounds.

Like a space shuttle launch

I covered a space shuttle launch one time where I set up a recorder to capture the roar of the thing blasting off. After the last speck of it disappeared into the blue, I played the recording back and found out that the launch caused the earth to shake and created a massive sound wave that washed over you like the surf, but I didn’t capture it. My theory was that the sound was too low a frequency for my recorder to pick up.

If I don’t get the sonic sound track tonight, I’m going to assume he hits those same frequencies. Maybe I can get video of the dining room windows vibrating.

Why don’t we just use a chainsaw?

I watched him tackle a bush in the front yard that was almost as high as the house. He used the massive hedge trimmer to bite out huge hunks of it, then he would walk around snipping a leaf here, a branch there, must like a barber might do to a head of hair. Every trip around the bush would cause it to get smaller and smaller. (I can only imagine how short the coffee table would become if he thought one leg was a little off and he needed to even it up.)

Finally, I said, “Dave, why don’t we make the process shorter? I’ll get the chainsaw and we can just take it off level with the ground.”

“It’ll grow back fast,” was his response.

Does she REALLY like those flowers?

After we finished Mother’s splendid dinner of liver and onions, mashed potatoes, with gravy, corn and some pink stuff with cherries in it, I felt a nap was in order, but he decided the grass needed mowing. Now, I’ve offered to do that before, but Mother always says she likes to mow, so don’t touch her mower. She must have seen the crazed look in David’s eyes, so she didn’t even try to stop HIM.

It took him a little while to figure out that you have to hold down the brake to start the beast. I think he was confused because he didn’t seem to understand the concept of a brake. He operated at two speeds: Fast and You’d Better Get Out of My Way.

Here he is contemplating if Mother really LIKES those flowers. “They’ll grow back,” I could hear him thinking.

Dust and a spray of walnuts

I watched him running at full tilt boogie right up until the time he made a turn and sprayed me with sticks, rocks, boulders and a rat-a-tat-tat of walnuts propelled faster than the speed of sound. I know it was that fast because they hit me before I heard ’em coming. I got the hint.

I calculate that he’s gonna be slowing down a little this week: he’s turning 60 on September 12.

August 22, 2014

Cape to Athens

I was supposed to head out for Athens, Ohio, on the afternoon of August 19 and make a leisurely two-day drive out of it, with some sightseeing along the way.

Right before I started breaking down the computer equipment for loading, the weather alert radio went off with a severe thunderstorm warning with reports of baseball-sized hail west of us. I didn’t want to take a chance on getting holes punched in my windows before heading off cross-country, so I holed up under the overhang at the nearby funeral home. I was joined by two other cars shortly after.

We got some gusty winds, heavy rain and about five minutes of pea and marble-sized hail, but it blew through quickly. A few limbs snapped off a walnut tree on the side of the house, but that was about it. Based on scanner traffic, Jackson must have gotten more of the storm than we did.

Saying goodbye

Mother and I usually take a group selfie when I head out, but since I’m going back to Cape in about a week, we decided to go with a wave.

I think she’s been watching too much TV news out of St. Louis. That looks less like a wave than a “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose.

Traffic was OK

With only a couple of exceptions, traffic was light and moving smoothly. Some clouds popped up a few times, but I had more bug splatters than rain splatters on the windshield.

Worked in a few naps

Listening to a good audio book about World War II kept me awake, but I did stop at some rest areas for seven and nine-minute naps. This is what I saw when I woke up from one of them.

I was in good company: there were six or eight 18-wheelers in the parking lot with their diesel engines grumbling away. It was either that or their pilots were really snoring.

Rolled into Athens with 532 miles under my belt at about 1:18 a.m. (I lost an hour due to the time zone change.) Wife Lila complained that 1:18 isn’t an “about” time.

I tried to explain that the exact time would be 1:18:42. I just rounded it to 1:18.

I don’t think it’s going to be safe for me to go home.