Bees 2, Undisputed ?

[Lambchop]

What kind of spider do you think it is, Walden? There's some thought now that it isn't just brown recluses and widows that are toxic, but a lot of the household ones. Wolf spiders, in particular.

[cowtime]

I hate spiders. I don't kill them- I can't get that close.I can't even look at a picture of the things without trauma. I leave them alone.

The first fall that we lived in this house some monsterspiders decided it was time to move inside. Now, I knew there was a problem with them because this house was my in-laws before us and I'd seen some scary ones here before, but I had no idea they were so bad. Of course my husband was gone hunting so I spent several horrible nights with the creatures. We had an exterminator come and even HE freaked out at the wolf spiders that he found. He comes back every year now.

I've had to get over this spider horroras much as possible since I carry the mail and they also move into mailboxes and the letters left in them in the fall. I've learned to knock the letters before I bring them into the car and to make emergency dismounts if one make it into my car.
It's another reason I do not favor the fall season.

[izzarina]

I'd go even further. My poor daughter freezes if she sees a spider in the bath, yet there is no spider in the UK that can so much as hurt a hair on a human head. I regularly have to go upstairs when screeches emerge from the bathroom...

I won't go near the darn things. They scare the living daylights out of me So when I see them in the bathroom, I make one of the older male species of the house dispose of it. Some of the ones we get here are really nasty...all black and furry. It gives me the heebies just thinking about it. I was doing laundry yesterday and noticed that a shirt had fallen down behind the washer, and so I decided to grab it (the laundry is in the basement....all common sense should have told me "DON'T TOUCH THAT SHIRT!!!", but of course it didn't). So I grab the shirt and a lovely, HUGE, black, furry spider comes running out. Good thing it didn't run toward me. I think my screams would have killed it for sure

As for bees, I do have an abnormal fear of them (would that be a psychosis?). When I was about 10, my brother was mowing the lawn and he also stumbled onto a ground bee hive. He must have been stung at least 20 times, and then went on to have a huge reaction and almost died. Since that time, I've been terrified of the stupid things. So while I don't actually feel your pain, Dale, I can truly say that I can sympathize with it.

[Lambchop]

Oh dear! All black and furry! And IN MAILBOXES! Ewww!

I cannot tell you how many mailboxes here I have seen which have black widow spiders living in them. I spot 'em by the webs and I go waaaay out into the street.

We had one of those old Florida homes when I was growing up. Since there was no air-conditioning in the olden days, frame houses would be built about 2 feet off the ground with big windows, open ventilation slats in the attic, and . . . spaces between the floorboards. I'm serious. The idea was that the air came up through the floor, from where it was cool under the house, and rose as it heated, to exit from the attic.

Those cracks between the boards was a highway for arthropods. They just moved in. And, predatory arthropods moved right in after to feed on them. We didn't even have to turn on the TV to see Wild Kingdom right in our house.

For years, there was a huge spider living in our dining room. It was fully the size of a dinner plate. It lived somewhere over the windows, coming out every night after dinner to hang around on the ceiling. Around and around the light fixture it went . . . all night, every night. Every now and then, it would drop down on a long silken thread, taking a shortcut to the table or the sideboard.

In the morning, there would be an assortment of dessicated carcasses lying around the room, evidence of his nocturnal feeds.

My mother loved that spider. She considered it her own personal exterminator.

I would gladly have smashed it, but I was too short. Although I practiced diligently, standing on a chair in order to reach the ceiling, I never did mount my attack, being afraid it would survive the attempt and run up the broom handle.

I hated that house.

[Cynth]

[
Heh. That's why, though I'm willing to uneasily tolerate the Insecta and Arachnida so long as they don't make any visible attempts to hurt me, I gotta strictly reserve "love" for beasts with 4 or fewer legs.

(We shall not speak of the Myriapoda. And I do admit to love for certain Crustacea...the ones that go well with drawn butter).

I'd go even further. My poor daughter freezes if she sees a spider in the bath, yet there is no spider in the UK that can so much as hurt a hair on a human head. I regularly have to go upstairs when screeches emerge from the bathroom, but, though I tell my wife and daughter that I've expelled the beast from the house, in truth I've merely rescued it from the bath and released it into some cupboard or pot plant or something. I love the idea of sharing my house with minibeasts so long as they're symbiotically-inclined (so no houseflies or cockroaches, thank you!)

How do you feel about earwigs? Horrid, horrid, sly, shiny pincery things that drop on your head by the tens from the door frame, lie in wait under the dish towel, eat the flower blossoms, inhabit every nook or cranny known to man, anything hollow, any crack. I'm at the point of killing them with my bare hands now the nasty things run so fast there's no time to get a weapon. Indoors, outdoors, they'll be happy to share your space believe me. And I'm going to tell your wife and daughter that you are not even putting the spiders outside!!!!!!!!!

Okay, they don't bite so it's not like they're wasps or yellow jackets. I guess we are blessed in that they don't seem to come right up out of the ground here. I would move, Dale.

Lamby, shouldn't you do something about this weird compulsion you have to poke bugs? Geez, that freaks me out. Don't go to Australia. They have more poisonous fuzzy creatures than anywhere else. I saw that on Nature. There are deadly spiders that kill people right in their own swimming pools.

[Charlene]

....

Beekeepers like to share their war stories. The worst I heard was the one who had a bee inside his veil and then crawling over his mustache. He stopped breathing and before he could pinch it, inhaled - getting the bee along with the air. He could feel it crawling inside his sinuses for a few minutes, going deeper and deeper. Then it stung. Imagine a nuke going off in your forehead. His eyes swelled shut for a week.

Thank you for that visual Casey. That ranks right up there with the Twilight Zone episode where the guy had an earwig eating through his brain, and when it finally came out he thought it was over, until the doctor announced that it was a female earwig and she had laid her eggs in his brain, and the little ones would be very hungry when they hatched.

I've been stung a couple of times but generally bees don't upset me. Now ants . . . . I hate ants. Especially the big carpenter ants that sit there and look at you and dare you to kill them.

Spiders are okay as long as I see them first.

[Lambchop]

Lamby, shouldn't you do something about this weird compulsion you have to poke bugs? Geez, that freaks me out. Don't go to Australia. They have more poisonous fuzzy creatures than anywhere else. I saw that on Nature. There are deadly spiders that kill people right in their own swimming pools.

Well, most of them don't sting, you know. They're kind of fun. When I was a kid, my mom used to make me stand outside until I'd emptied all my pockets. I kept bringing bugs in. My dad finally made me a nice screened terarrium if I would agree to stop sneaking them in. I could keep them a day and then had to let them go.

I think I saw that same show. I also saw one about the snakes that come right into your house. They have snake-911 numbers you call when you see one and some Crocodile Dundee type rushes over to catch it. One poor woman had one in her half-bath. It had a weird sink, I remember. And that snake.

OK, don't panic. Bug pix coming up. These are harmless. They're really quite cute. They'll climb around on you for ages. Well, the big ones will. The nymphs are soft and will squash if you try to pick them up. The adults are the ones with the nice handles.

These are "thorn bugs." Umbonia crassicornis. We had a thorn tree full of them.



Here are some nymphs and adults. The mother bugs take care of the little ones, shepherding them around and protecting them from predators. They communicate chemically and also with SOUND, so they know which babies belong to which mom. (That article is really interesting.)



Here's a mom Umbonia crassicornis:



Interestingly, the chemicals they communicate with get incorporated into their shells, so they are repellent to predators. I can attest to the fact that they taste bad.

These, however, do not taste too bad.



I ate one of these when I was about a year and a half. My auntie gave up on prying it out of my mouth and just gave me a glass of water to wash it down.

Here's a nice photo of a lacewing. It really hurts when they sting, too. They only do it . . . if you touch them.

Of course.

[SteveShaw]

Lacewings don't sting!! They are extremely useful in that they devour aphids rapaciously. As for earwigs, they are completely harmless to people though they pretend to be by "threatening" you with their pincers. A pain in the neck in dahlias and chrysanths admittedly, but my solution to that is to grow something a little less municipal in the first place. If I knew that there was such a thing as a poisonous British spider (there isn't) I'd just learn how to identify it so that I could avoid it. Spiders in the house are invariably useful and should not be put out or killed. I came across one of those poisonous redback spiders in Australia but it was completely uninterested in me. I heard they can hide under toilet seats though....

[Flyingcursor]

The creepy thread.

I too am horrified by spiders. Earwigs are creepy but don't bother me too much. I kind of like ants unless they're in the house. I cannot abide roaches. Japanese beetles are kind of pretty but we had a plague of them about 15 years ago. They weren't so pretty then.

I got bit on the arm by something last week and the bite looked horrible for three days. Then it healed. There were two small blisters about 1mm in size. The distance from center to center was a little over 3 mm. No idea what it was.

[avanutria]

I have a mild earwig phobia which is going away with time, but I still don't want to touch one. It comes from when I was about 4 years old and my mom gave me a drink of something, and put a straw in it from the kitchen drawer. The straw had an earwig in it, and I got it in my mouth. I think it might have been chocolate milk, but whatever it was, the drink and the earwig got spit all over the kitchen floor.

For years after that I had to look through any straw I received before using it, even if I had unwrapped the thing myself.

I am also not a fan of spiders and Mr. MarMil deals with 90% of the ones in our house. I am having trouble accepting the fact that none of the ones here can kill me.

I have never been stung but have had some close calls. There is a photo of me aged about 12 years old, when my brother and I were at Kennedy Space Centre. He was making me stand in front of one of the outdoor exhibits while he got the perfect photo. Something was itching me on my belly inside my shirt, I figured it was a leaf or something so I pinched it through my shirt to deal with after the photo. When I got to look, it was a bee/wasp of some kind. I'm not sure who was more surprised, but we parted ways pretty quickly.

[emmline]

I love the thornbugs.
I tend to rescue spiders if at all possible, using the cup and postcard technique.

[Martin Milner]

there is no spider in the UK that can so much as hurt a hair on a human head.

My head no longer has much hair - does this put me at more or less risk?

[Jack]

I love the thornbugs.
I tend to rescue spiders if at all possible, using the cup and postcard technique.

I just pick them up usually.

[Nanohedron]

There are deadly spiders that kill people right in their own swimming pools.

I don't know what's more marvelous: that Australian spiders build their own swimming pools, or that they can lure Australians into them.

[jsluder]

Beekeepers like to share their war stories. The worst I heard was the one who had a bee inside his veil and then crawling over his mustache. He stopped breathing and before he could pinch it, inhaled - getting the bee along with the air. He could feel it crawling inside his sinuses for a few minutes, going deeper and deeper. Then it stung. Imagine a nuke going off in your forehead. His eyes swelled shut for a week.

Thanks. I'll be up tonight. Mind if I call you about 4:00 a.m.?

I may just take the ferry over to Kingston and wake him up for you, Dale. Having experienced the blinding pain of being stung on the eyelid by a hornet, this little tale is gonna give me nightmares.