Pest?

The first wasp of the season is something to note; it is a flying indication that summer or something spring-like is near.  OK, the wasp may have been lured into the wide open though a freakishly summery day, but it is a harbinger of warmer days ahead.

     I suppose it was my observation of the creature rather than a frantic flapping as it approached my cup of tea and baguette after my customary swim than started my jottings.  Although I suppose it is tempting fate to say it, I have never been stung by a wasp.  Indeed, now I come to consider it, I don’t know anyone who has been stung by a wasp either.  I have been stung by a bee; but that was because I topped a passing weed when walking the dog and a bee happened to be on the plant head.  I can hardly blame the poor creature for having an instinctive reaction to being swept up in a giant hand!  And I can remember looking at the tiny, still pulsating sting lodged in the fleshy part of my hand at the base of my thumb and realizing that the ‘offending’ bee was now one of the flying dead.

     The reaction of people to wasps is one that goes beyond the pain of the sting; for some people the fear of these creatures is visceral and reduces them to gibbering wrecks.  Mind you, I have seen the same reaction to the appearance of a daddy-long-legs – and when has one of those ever managed to pierce the skin of a human!

     My aunt had an allergic reaction to wasp stings.  She was told that if she was stung she should not panic, but go to a hospital immediately – but she was not as neurotic about wasps than those who only had to endure a little local pain if they managed to get it to attack.  Fear of wasps is not logical: yes, there is the possibility of a sting, but you have to work fairly hard to get a wasp to attack.

     The post-swim wasp did come exploring me and had an expeditionary crawl along my hand, and then it flew away.  That has always been my experience; wasps do not really want to expend energy and valuable venom on a creature that is not (usually) going to drop down dead in response.  However, I do not go out of my way to commune with wasps as my experience with the bee shows that even the most placid ‘live and let live’ attitude can be compromised by accident.

     And the last section of the poem asks the question of definition as we usually find that approximation is enough for action.

 

 

 

Pest?

I don’t kill wasps.

Don’t panic-swat with flailing hand,

infuriate with futile squeals.

I let them be.

And watch.

As they traverse the contours of my hands;

short, darting tongues through hairs to flesh

to drink in what I smell of: meat.

The gaudy abdomen, sting tipped

in sunshine’s gleam, is threat,

but why should they, whose prey

is ants and spiders, flies and Coke

take on a landscape smeared with taste?

For me the wasps are visitors:

they stay; they eat; they leave.

And no attack, no pain, just tickle-foraging

through hirsute undergrowth. 

And flight. 

Away.

An aunt of mine

did not kill wasps,

though they could easily

have finished her:

anaphylactic shock

could follow sting –

and death, of course.

But she did not

regard the summer months

as buzzing with mortality.

Discarded ice cream wrappers

and the overflowing bin

were Scylla and Charybdis

on an August stroll, for her,

but she pressed on as if the

sighted, noted, danger was not there;

walked though, and passed unscathed.

Our fear becomes attack:

provokes and redefines.

The wasp has a bad press

(and there’s resentment

at no ‘bee-death’ after sting)

but it’s entitled to defend when it’s ‘attacked’

It’s feared, though adder’s feared more,

and adders do not lurk for human strike,

but they will bite if stepped upon.

And bite and sting are real,

though more in thought

than in lived life.

Pain is always possible,

but weapon’s definition

not offence.

Flight, not fight, the coloured patterns urge,

and gaudiness is warning: go or stay,

your choice,

and was the ‘wasp’ that started

all of this a hoverfly?