Watch the little things
General Topic
No way I could begin to count the number of times I have been stung by various insects. Two days ago, I got nailed by what we call a ground hornet/yellow jacket-little black yellow thingie, hurts like a sumbuck. Happened many times before, did not give it a lot of thought, removed the stinger and kept mowing. Woke up middle of the night, arm on fire and swollen, running low fever. Good thing I am married up with a doctor lady. Some sort of allergic reaction, she reckons. Gave me a shot in the butt with something and doing better already. Could have been a problem in elk camp.
I have been stung by similar wasp, jet black and they burrow into the ground by water.....
Good lord, I have never swollen up like that !!
I was lucky it was just one that stung me.
Hang in there man
Good luck, Robb
Hate those bastards! I kill them with a vengeance whenever I see a nest on my property.
Out working on cattle fencing yesterday and got nailed four times. Top of the head, no hair to protect it. Back of the neck and both arms. Luckily I was working and sweating hard enough I guess to not have a noticeable reaction. The one in the top of the head hurt like a Bast#%¥ though.
It is important to get stung at least once a summer to keep from getting arthritis. So I seem to stick to this treatment.
good luck on the recovery john. sounds like you dodged a real bullet on that one.
Bees and I don't get along AT ALL, swell up like someone stuck half a golf ball under my skin.
My partner and I were doing a search for a wanted felon - looking in an older trailer house and I stood up on the trailer tongue and basically put my head into a bee hive. Stung by 5 or 6 bees all at once (top of my head is basically a landing strip for critters). I let out a bit of a muffled scream and bailed off. Partner came running around the corner ready to get in the fight. Funny now .... not so much then.
I’m allergic and carry epi pen. I have started a preventative measure and seems to be working.. I get injections worth about 50 stings every ten weeks. My last sting I didn’t have any reaction at all..
it’s an allergy shot. May want to look into it if you are same as I was.. bees suck!
Inshart....great story! I bet it wasn't funny at the time...lol!
When I was 15, a friend and I went with my parents to look at a house that was for sale, we decided to take a walk and check out the are for potential deer hunting (in case they purchased the house). We walked through an overgrown field edge and must have distributed a yellow jacket nest in the ground on the way through, as we were walking back, they hammered us.
I fell down not realizing what happened and when I got up, I had hundreds of bees on me. I started wiping them off as I was running and stripping clothes at the same time. They were inside of my clothes, in my hat, in my shoes.
We got a really strange look from my parents and the real estate agent as we were walking back in nothing but our underwear. I ended up with 39 stings and my buddy had 28, we are very fortunate that neither of us had any allergic reaction.
Place we used tolive, had abig mess of them around a hole int he ground. I snuck up poured about a gallon of gas down the hole, then, lit it. It blew up 30-yards away. But it killed them all. I'm fine, now.
My old boss ran over a yellow jacket nest while bush hogging on an open tractor - he was literally wiping them out of his hair - had hundreds of stings and damn near killed him.
Lee
Once I was beating on a dead log to try to get a bull's attention...it happened to be a yellowjacket nest. I got stung around the face and neck no less than dozen times. I probably set a new record for the 100 yard dash, and they were still chasing me down and nailing me. Had to make a big circle and sneak back to the nest (now a massive swarm)...to grab my pack and bow.
Yeah, with all the rain, and the Yellowjacket stings, life was just peachy out there for the next 7 days...not one of my finest elk hunts!
And as a point of fact, yellow jackets don't leave their stingers in you. Honey bees do that.
So do ground hornets or whatever you wish to call them. I have picked dozens of them out and am quite familiar with honeybees. best of my knowledge, they, honeybees, don't nest in holes in the ground.
I was probably 12 and my brother was 8. We were at a friends place out on a small lake. They had a little shed/boat dock on the lake. There was a wasp nest under the shed. We got to swatting at them with a boat oar. When they started to get agitated, I told my brother. (When they come at us, just jump in the lake and swim under water for a ways). So I whacked the nest good. HERE THEY CAME. I hollered at him jump in and swim. I dove in and swam under water for a long ways. I came up to the sound of my brother SCREAMING. At that age we didn't think the whole thing thru very good. He had a life jacket on and couldn't go under water. Wow can he scream. I don't know how many stung him on the head but it was a bunch.
Shot a bull solo in Colo one year way down in this nasty hole. This is many years ago when I hunted with just a daypack. When I came back with my frame pack to break the bull down it was covered in Yellowjackets...hundreds of em. Of course the Benedryl i "always carry" was in my daypack.
I somehow only got stung 3 or 4 times...all on the same hand. My hand was twice the size with the redness and swelling creeping up my arm on the first load. Lucky it was pouring rain so i just took off my jacket and the cool rain helped.
it was about 2 hours out...and once at the truck, some benedryl putting it on ice and kicking back for an hour did wonders.
Last summer honeybees got me 16 times, then two weeks later 24 times. I was beginning to feel unwanted. I think the first ones were Africanized, some of them followed me 1/4 mile. I was in third gear on my dozer. If I'd had a fourth gear, I'd have been in that ! The next set quit when I got 40 yards away. My poor little dog was with me on my backhoe and I had to rake them off him. I don't think he got stung though, too much hair :-)
Yellow Jackets are a bush hog operator’s worst nightmare.
I’ve been hit by them several times and they do have a wicked sting.
Around here where I live it’s wasps. It gets a little humid with the monsoon season and those little devils like hot and humid places. They get into my holdimg pens since they are all made out of pipe and nail you while unloading animals or moving them for slaughter. I hate it when the get into a little space above your head and you don’t see them. They become dive bombing kamikaze’s.
I was about 15' up a ladder ripping siding off of my house. I dropped a piece and it hit the nest of ground dwelling wasps. They were smart enough to figure out the source of the disturbance. That was the first time I have slid down a ladder getting stung on the way. I got around a dozen stings as I don't think there were that many wasps in that hole. Could have been a lot worse.
I was also on a 50 mile trail race and there was a nest at mile 12. You could hear each group getting stung as you got closer but it was steep downhill and rocky so there wasn't much of an alternative. I got 3 stings that didn't swell or get red at all. I think my body reaction was spending all of its effort to keep my legs from falling off and it ignored the stings. Could have been a lot worse.
Doing a fishing tournament on Lake of the Woods last weekend got stung once in the evening on the shins, and then once on day 1 of the tournament by a hornet. Walking barefoot in the boat stepped on it and he got me right in that soft stuff bottom of the foot. Forgot how that stings I haven't been stung in like 13 years now, and then 2 days running.
A buddy and I were riding ATVs up the FS trail to set up elk camp. The rains had washed the trail out enough that we couldn’t get through, so we were going to stack rocks back into the washout enough to get by.
I was down in the washout, below my buddy, handing him rocks, when my head felt like is was on fire. There was a nest of yellow jackets just about eyeball high and they were pissed!
I had a heck of a time trying to scramble out of that wash. I got stung probably 20-30 times on my face/head before I got out. My hands were all muddy, so I smeared it all over my face and that actually seemed to ease the burning somewhat.
That’s one of my buddy’s favorite hunting stories for some reason :-(
I got stung on the hip by one of the SOB's years ago and my whole groin swelled up. I was on a fishing trip, and when I got back went to the doc. He told me that it must have affected my lymph gland(s) in the area. I recovered with no lasting trouble. Maybe the same happened to the OP.
"I got stung on the hip by one of the SOB's years ago and my whole groin swelled up."
Worst bar pick up line ever?
