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Monday, April 30, 2007

What is Wrong With.... Japanese Giant Wasps?

Man, have I got a story to tell you...
I was walking to class today (as many of you well know it takes a bloody fortnight to get to classes at UMass Amherst) and today was a windy day so as one could imagine there was lots of debris flying around. Well i thought nothing of this until I looked to my left and whizzing at me at a good 80 mile per hour clip was a JAPANESE GIANT WASP (Vespa mandarinia)! It hit me square in the shoulder and broke my arm in 3 places, the doctors said that I was lucky it was not completely severed, which is why it has taken me 98 hours to type what I have thus far. Well you would think that was the end of the story but no, that is just where it begins!!! Upon being nailed by this massive insect, and apart from having my arm literally shattered like an egg dropped from 11 and a half feet, I was also rendered immediately unconscious. If not for my trusty camera phone I would not have been able to remember the incident or have evidence to sue the bee community or have been able to show you this picture: I had heard later that someone found the bastard bee and smooshed it with a Timberland, this person is now being held by the police for questioning in an apparent apiacide. Now, even after this ordeal, I have to consider myself lucky, had the bee not been inebriated, it could have stung me with its quarter inch stinger, and as you all know very well, Japanese Giant Wasps do not have barbs on their stingers and can sting repeatedly, and in the process release a pheromone which attracts dozens of other bastard beast bees. While in a meeting with my attorney we were interrupted by the FBI which had come to inform us that they were building a case against the Japanese Giant Wasp population and we were told not to go ahead with our case. It seems that Japanese Giant Wasps dominate the European Honeybee which has no defense against the Wasps which are approximately 10 million times larger than the docile Honeybee. In fact, about a half dozen or so Japanese Giant Wasps can devastate an entire hive of over 30,000 Honeybees in a matter of hours, suffering only minor casualties. The fascinating thing is that the Japanese Giant Wasps send out a single scout from their hive to find the Honeybees and then they mark the hive with a pheromone which will send the attackers into a frenzy, then once finished with the slaughter, the Japanese Giant Wasps will gather the larvae and eggs from the Honeybee colonies and bring them back to feed the young Japanese Giant Wasps. What's more is that the native Japanese Honeybees have built up a defense against the Japanese Giant Wasps. What happens is when a scout approaches a Honeybee hive, the Honeybees retreat into the hive and lure the Giant Wasp into the hive where they engulf it with Honeybees and then they vibrate so quickly that the body temperature of the Japanese Giant Wasp is raised a few degrees above it's tolerance, but still within the Honeybee's tolerance, thus killing the intruder and securing the hive from an attack. This practice comes at a cost however and several hundred bees die in the process.


This is where the Devil's live JAPAN:







Alright, obviously my story was dumb and fabricated, but it isn't completely false. A large bee actually did clumsily fly into my arm today riding a gust of wind. I was frightened but held my composure and ran like a little girl.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have one of these things my son cought in upper ohio

Anonymous said...

I usually don’t post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful …