Wasps!

[Benchwayze]

I know the feeling Mailee.

I found out the hard way that most insects are attracted to the colour yellow. I wore a yellow shirt one day when I went on a painting trip. In the end to get away from tiny little biting flies I had to don a blue tracksuit jacket.

As for the service they doo us, they hang around refuse bins, to ambush flies which they dismember and take back to the nest. Macabre eh? Much as I hate wasps, I hate flies even more! :twisted:

 

[Jonzjob]

We have one of these in the house and another in the car. So far they have been used both for wasp stings, one on me, and mossie bites and they work!!!

http://www.aspivenin.co.uk/

If you get a wasp sting the sooner you use it the better. When I was stung I used it within a few minutes and the discomfort was gone almost immediatly. Magic bit of kit and well worth it.

Good for snake bites too and not the alcholoc varient either :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

 

[Sawyer]

It's the asian hornets that kill the bees and they are about an inch or bigger. They are also very aggressive and in lots of parts of France. There was an article "Meteo et la Carte" on France3 this lunchtime and there is a good trap for them. I bought one last year for the wasps we get around the pool.

This is like ours and you can get the bait from a garden centre. We got ours from Gamme Verte..

https://www.google.fr/search?q=piege+a+ ... 3404052283

The real problem with them is that when attacking bee colonies, they don't follow the European rules of engagement, established by millions of years of bee vs. hornet conflict. Unused to the new tactics, the bees sally out to meet them and are slaughtered in their thousands by bites, not stings.
Asian bees know this and defend their nests by a different tactic, which gives them a decent chance of success.

 

[Grayo]

My dad was badly stung by hornets years ago when I was a young kid. He was renovating an old country house and this day he was pulling a ceiling down in a downstairs room. He had set up scaffolding (saw benches and planks) all around the room blocking off the exits. When they started to pull the ceiling down they disturbed a hornets nest. My dad was stung very badly in his head and neck and still has the scars on the back of his neck to this day.

When they finally managed to get out of the room my dad collapsed and an ambulance was called. Luckily as the ambulance men were putting my dad in the ambulance a doctor was doing a house call next door and came and gave my dad an injection of some sort which seemed to do the trick. At the time the doctor said had he not been there he didn't think my dad would have made it to the hospital.

My dad is 91 years old next week so having been stung so many times by the hornets it's had no lasting effect on him apart from the scars on his neck. He never blocked off an escape route/doorway ever again.