Things that Sting Down on the Farm
by Ida Livingston of Davis City, IA
When my great grandmother, Ellene George, lived on the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, she wrote a children’s book called “Please Don’t Step on Me.” A young native boy walked through the book exploring the bugs in his world. It encouraged awareness and respect for these small and often defenseless members of the world we live in.
Not all are defenseless however. There are a spectrum of these creatures who are equipped to fight back. But just because it can sting or bite, that doesn’t mean that it needs to be exterminated. Rarely do any of these display aggression beyond defending themselves or their home. This is easily understood. Aside from this, many insects are also beneficial in ways we never see beyond their stinger.
Honeybees
Starting with the most obvious beneficial stinging thing on the farm, honeybees are extremely valuable as a pollinator and for the honey that they produce. They are often (but not always!) docile, and many small farms have a couple hives. As a child, when we played hide-and-seek after dark, my favorite place to hide was right behind one of Dad’s big hives. It was not a place quickly discovered, and sometimes others were not bold enough to pursue me through the apiary.
Usually Dad’s hives were pretty easy-going. Often when we extracted honey, Dad would wear the bee suit, but as he pulled out frames, my siblings and I would walk right up to the open hive and take the frames from him to carry to the house wearing no protective gear whatsoever. We were rarely ever stung.
We had a few hives over the years though that had attitude issues. One hive would sting you if you had a running motor anywhere near it. It also didn’t tolerate pedestrian traffic within 4 to 5 yards of the hive. Sorry, Dad, those frames are all yours!
Another hive was too near one of our crop fields considering how cranky they were. They didn’t like the smell of sweat and if you were cultivating in that field in the middle of the day, they would seek you out and sting both you and your horse. Definitely added some excitement to the tedium of cultivating! Generally, cultivating in the vicinity of that hive had to be done very early in the morning.
My husband had a couple hives that were very aggressive. When he opened them up to work on them, there was little they could do because he was suited. But once he was done, no one could work in the nearby garden as the bees would patrol over 100 yards looking for someone to punish.
Aggressive hives are inconvenient but they are often more productive than docile hives. Khoke had an ultra aggressive hive that became the largest he ever had with boxes stacking eight feet high. They out produced all our other hives combined.
Even docile hives can be disagreeable if you choose poor timing to open them. Honeybees don’t like to be bothered in hot, humid weather. Pick a low humidity day for best results. They get really cranky if you open them on either side of a rain shower. They don’t like to feel open and vulnerable to incoming bad weather. An instinct worth keeping.
Honeybees are one of very few that over-winter as a hive. Also unique to them is their one-sting-wonder. They have a barbed stinger that at least partially disembowels them when employed. Defending their hive costs them their life. If you get stung, scrape the stinger sideways with a butterknife to dislodge it. Don’t pull it out. The syringe-like stinger has a goblet of venom that gets injected into your skin when you pull it out with your fingers.
Africanized Bees
Africanized bees are a honeybee that is highly temperamental. A breeder in southern Brazil was interbreeding honeybees to try to create a more productive strain than the European (Western) honeybees commonly used here in the Americas. He had an African subspecies housed in his apiary as he studied their virulent habits.
What was bound to happen sooner or later, did. In 1957, they escaped. He controlled these hives with queen excluders. A visiting beekeeper felt these excluders were unnecessarily hindering the hives and removed them, accidentally releasing 26 Africanized hive swarms into history. Once Pandora’s box is opened, you can’t put it back.
As I mentioned previously, aggressive hives tend to be more productive. Africanized hives are ultra-productive and can produce over 200 lbs of honey per hive. In fact, most Central and South American apiaries have transitioned to using Africanized bees for this reason. Yes, on purpose.
One trick that I heard some beekeepers employ in order to have a better relationship with their Africanized hive is to wear a piece of fabric that absorbs their body odor, then lay this fabric in an empty hive box shortly before putting a swarm in it. This familiarizes them with the person’s smell and they identify that person as part of their hive.
Africanized bees are quicker to swarm than European hives as they become impatient with nectar shortages quickly. By 1990 these bees had migrated from southern Brazil to as far north as southern Texas. They didn’t stop there either. The main thing that stops them is cold winters. Maybe winter in general. Their tendency to swarm when foraging becomes scarce can leave them prone to swarming too late in the year to have enough stores laid up to make it through the winter. They likely won’t climb the latitude ladder higher than the American south.
These Africanized bees are a honeybee and readily hybridize with European honeybees. This usually results in more productive – and temperamental, European honey bees. Still, being only a honeybee, these Africanized bees have a barbed stinger that can only sting you once, just like any other honeybee, and it is not any more potent of a sting. They are just more easily provoked and respond in far greater numbers over a much greater distance (as far as a quarter of a mile).
With all the media and movie hype about “killer bees,” it can be hard to separate the facts from fiction. It is said that they have killed in the neighborhood of 1000 people. This sounds like a lot until you take a realistic look at the statistics. A thousand people over the course of nearly 70 years and spanning 2 continents. Statistically, you are in more danger from a horse or cow and far more so from an automobile.
That said, no one wants to volunteer themselves to make statistics, so for those living in areas that have Africanized bees or areas that they may move into, it may be wise to make an emergency plan should one have an encounter with an attacking swarm. If we were somehow caught on fire, we are trained as children to “Stop, Drop, and Roll.” This would help us survive a situation such as a fire, even though our chance of meeting such a situation in a lifetime is remote. Yet, it is there. A safety plan is never a bad idea.
Be wary of wild honeybee hives that are in the ground. Africanized bees are more naturally a cavity dweller than European honey bees who prefer hollow trees. If you find yourself under attack by a swarm,
- Make for the nearest house or car as quickly as possible.
- Don’t panic if you can help it, as that disables your ability to think.
- Unless you have an allergy to bees, you can sustain and survive a lot more stings than you think you can.
- The most important part is to protect your face and neck.
- Pull your shirt up to protect your head if you can. You can see through most light-medium weight fabric.
- Tighten the fabric above and below your face and neck to keep out as many bees as possible.
- Then make your way to safety if it isn’t reasonably close.
In addition to concern for humans, Africanized bees can be hard on animals. Horses and cattle enclosed in a fence who happen to kick up an Africanized swarm have nowhere to run to escape them. They usually have enough body mass that they wouldn’t actually be killed, but would certainly sustain a terrible number of stings. Dogs are in more danger of being stung to death.
Africanized bees won’t be going away. We have to learn to live with them in a world we now share. They join the ranks of regional risks that we watch for along with venomous snakes and scorpions in the Southwest. Some future generation won’t know that the bees have not always been here.
Mason Bees
Mason bees are a little solitary bee that is also an important pollinator. They don’t produce honey like the honeybees, but they will fly at cooler temperatures (50-degrees F). This makes them an important early Spring orchard pollinator.
There are over a couple hundred species, each having adapted to the regions where they live. And they look a little different from each other. The Mason bees don’t make hives like other bees do. Each female is fertile and makes her own (tiny) nest. They often look for small hollow spaces, like empty Carpenter bee holes or hollow reeds.
Little Miss Mason Bee finds her desired nest hole and packs the back of it with pollen and nectar, then she lays a female egg there. Then she encapsulates the cell by making a mud partition and begins filling the next section with pollen and nectar, lays another egg, and makes another mud wall. This repeats until she comes to the end of her hollow corridor. Once done, she plugs the entrance and flies off to find another nest site.
The female eggs are laid farthest back and the male eggs closer to the entrance. The males hatch first and wait around for the females to hatch, even helping them out sometimes. Then they mate with the females who then fly away to find their own nesting holes.
In Tennessee we have a family friend named Tim Ramey who is the gentlest of souls and the local walking encyclopedia. He came to our farm frequently and would educate us, at length, on all things that sting or any one of several other topics.
Tim would bring by bundles of reeds cut about a foot long. Dad would put these bundles up in the rafters of our shed. The Mason bees would nest from both sides of the cut reeds. In the Spring the shed would buzz with the sound of a huge swarm of bees – Mason bees.
Thankfully, these sweet little pollinators are very docile. They rarely, if ever, sting and are not aggressive at all. One can drill holes 5/16”-3/8” in diameter into a block of wood 4 to 6 inches deep to offer homes for these hardworking little pollinators. They are neighborly and don’t fight so a block of wood can have 50-100 holes drilled into it. Set the block in a sheltered place under a roof and they will find it and be grateful.
Bumble Bees
If it’s late Summer when Khoke mows a field for hay that has been out of the mowing rotation for a couple of years, he doesn’t even aim for optimism. He just rides his hay mower out to the field wearing his bee suit. The question is not if he will hit a bumble bee nest, it is how many?
Bumble bees like to take over vacated mouse nests in old thatch (dead grass). Whether the nest was previously vacated, or the vacation was encouraged by the bumblebees, I’m not sure. Overall, they are a pretty laid back bee, until you wreck their nest with a hay mower. Then they are not laid-back at all. They aren’t a one-sting-wonder like honeybees either!
The nests are not organized and orderly like those of honeybees. Although they do produce honey, there isn’t a surplus. A little more handto- mouth. Probably because, unlike honeybees, bumble bees do not over winter.
In late fall, bumble bees hatch some new queens and drones (males) that mate. These queens then fly away to find a place to safely over winter. They are usually looking for some sort of piled plant matter for that shelter. Often it is not the cold itself that is damaging to insects, it is the dryness. If they overwinter in a place not sufficiently sheltered from the winter air, they will dry out and die, and it is too cold in the winter to find a place to relocate. In the Spring, the fertile queens crawl out and find a nest site. Once there, they begin to lay eggs and build their hives.
Bumble bees can fly and pollinate at much cooler temperatures than other bees, all the way down to around 45-degrees F. My Dad used to tell us how as a child, his parents would not let him, or his siblings, go barefoot in the Spring until they had spotted seven bumble bees. Thankfully, Dad never required that of us. If we were dumb enough to go barefoot in the snow, he’d let the snow educate us.
The primary pollinator for red clover are bumble bees. Although there are well over 200 species of bumble bees, many are struggling to survive and are becoming endangered. Monoculture and aggressive mowing wipes out their habitat. On top of this, as a summer pollinator, like honeybees, they are vulnerable to the effects of systemic neonicotinoid sprays.
Neonicotinoid pesticides are very powerful and, unfortunately, popular. They are systemic sprays that render the entire plant toxic to insects. Not just topically, there is no “washing off” the pesticide. It is the whole plant. Often commercial seeds are coated with it. This chemical is so potent that it renders the emerging seedling toxic to all insects, often even through the blooming phase of the plant’s life cycle. This kills pollinators. This isn’t even talking about the late applications sprayed in the field of some crops, or the soil drenches that leach into our water supply.
Carpenter Bees
Carpenter bees look very much like a bumble bee and are often mistaken for them. There are some key differences, however. Bumblebees are black and yellow striped and have fuzzy, hairy bodies. Carpenter bees have one broad yellow/gold stripe behind their head, their abdomen is completely black, hairless and shiny.
Female carpenter bees are the only ones with a stinger, however she is very docile and usually too busy to want to quarrel. The males do not have a stinger but they will sometimes hover in your space to intimidate you if you linger too near the nesting sites.
A fertile female selects a site to make her nest. Carpenter bees are solitary bees and don’t make hives like a bumblebee. Instead she looks for dry, usually weathered wood, that is preferably a softwood like pine. Here she bores into the wood, not as deep as it looks, and then makes a 90-degree turn to tunnel parallel with the outer surface.
Once she has bored a length of wood sufficient to the needs of several chambers, she begins, in a manner very similar to the Mason bee, to line her corridor with pollen, lay an egg, and then seal off the chamber. Fittingly, she uses sawdust that she regurgitates to seal the chambers. She was making pressed wood housing material long before the modern era began.
Carpenter bees have their pros and cons. They are a large attractive pollinator that is not particularly aggressive. Their lack of popularity stems from their housing preferences. They will pockmark porches, barns, and outbuildings with their holes. The holes are only the exterior evidence of their presence. They do much more damage with their interior work. However, most of the damage is cosmetic, it would take a plague of carpenter bees or decades to do structural damage. A greater concern is that these holes can allow entry for moisture which accelerates decay. Their holes, if not reused next year by one of their own, are often used by Mason bees.
Yellow Jackets
Moving away from pollinators, let’s look at predatory stinging things. If you have ever been stung on the mouth while sharing your picnic drink with a yellow jacket, or bit into a late fall apple or pear with a parting sting from said insect, raise your hand. You probably have plenty of company.
Yellow jackets are about the size of a honeybee, but they are brighter yellow in color with contrasting bold black bands and they look meaner. Because they are. But, like anything, they usually only sting if they are guarding their food, home, or self.
Adult yellow jackets eat fruit and nectar. They seek out protein in the form of bugs, or even meat, when they can find it. This is fed to their young.
Like most other non-honeybees, yellow jackets do not overwinter as a hive. Their late fall hatching of queens mate and seek shelter under bark, leaf piles, firewood and other places to overwinter. Really harsh winters can kill these queens making yellow jackets scarce for a few years until more move into the area.
Yellow jackets are not inhibited like honeybees. They can sting you as many times as you let them. Most yellow jackets nest in the ground. When we have a really bad year for them and they become too aggressive over our fall fruit, Khoke will don his bee suit, track some back to their hive and stamp it out to reduce the population stress.
Bald-faced Hornets
Bald-faced Hornets are, technically, not a true hornet. They are actually an overgrown black and white cousin of the yellow jacket (who are technically in the wasp family). They make large conical paper nests that usually hang from a tree, but sometimes you’ll see them in a barn or other outbuilding and, once, on my dad’s porch.
My Father loves Bald-faced hornets. They aggressively hunt flies to feed to their young. Dad always said that anything that eats flies or mosquitos is his friend. He used to leave the screen door open while we ate lunch because we had a couple Bald-faced hornets who would come in and nab a fly.
We always enjoyed watching the hornets while we were milking in the early evenings. They would come into the milking parlor and catch flies off the milk cows. What was really neat to see was when they would catch horseflies.
In Tennessee, we had several different types of horseflies. One of them was a huge black horsefly that was at least an inch long. Longer, and significantly larger than a Bald-faced hornet. One evening a hornet was feeling lucky and grabbed one of these huge horseflies. It was a heroic battle that ended with the hornet stinging the horsefly. But this Goliath was too big for the hornet to carry off. It was too much work to waste it, so the hornet chewed it in half and carried the first piece home, then came back for the second half. Bald-faced hornets hunt not only for flies but also caterpillars and spiders. These are all fed to their young.
Beware if you have a large dark-colored mole. These hornets are often in a hurry and may not look closely at their catch. My father and myself each have a prominent mole on our face that a hornet tried to carry off for us. Since the mole wouldn’t let go, the hornet stung it. Mine is just below my eyebrow and getting stung so close to my eye definitely staggered me in the moment. I dabbed some lavender oil on the sting site which helped but not enough to save me the vexation of a swollen face and mild black eye for the next couple days.
These hornets are famous for how aggressively they defend their nests. If you throw a rock and hit their nest, they can and will track you down. Then they will sting you as many times as they can pull their stinger out of you and put it back in.
I have always heard that they will even follow the trajectory of the bullets of those people who shoot the nest. I have never been interested in testing this theory. They have always been my friends. Even if we did have a misunderstanding once. These fierce defenders have extra super powers: they can eject venom out of their stinger, spraying the venom into the eyes of their target. At least they’ll try.
If you want a good look at their nest, wait until a couple good hard freezes are past. They don’t overwinter. Once the young queens fly away in the fall, the rest of the hive dies in cold weather. Inside a bald-faced hornet’s nest looks like several stories of large paper wasp nests and then wrapped in the outer paper protective covering. If you wait too long to investigate, then you will likely find that woodpeckers or other wildlife have destroyed the nest to eat the dead hornets.
European Hornets
As I said, Bald-faced Hornets are not a true hornet. European Hornets however, are. These are not native to America and immigrated here in the mid 1800-s. They are larger than the Bald-faced Hornet and are about an inch long.
We don’t like them as much on this side of the “pond” as they do in Europe. In places there, they are protected. Here we resent them for killing honeybees, which they do, but not as aggressively as Asian Hornets. One Spring day in Tennessee, an unlucky European hornet queen made the mistake of flying in our door. Dad recognized her, slammed the door and then looked like a madman as he swung his felt hat around trying to smash her.
Asian Hornets
Now, the Asian Hornets are really the invasive species to watch out for. They are really hard on honeybees. These have been found in the southeastern United States and of course are spreading. The Giant Asian Hornet, which is worse even than your regular Asian Hornet, was found in Washington a few years ago. Effort was made to find and eradicate them which is believed to have been successful.
A handful of Asian hornets can kill a hive of honeybees. When they find a hive of honeybees, these hornets hover nearby and catch and kill the bees as they fly. This is a very serious problem.
Eastern honeybees are Asian honeybees and have adapted somewhat to the threat of Asian hornets. Western (European) honey bees are much less adapted and vulnerable. One thing Eastern honeybees can do in defense, or perhaps, offense, is when an Asian hornet actually enters the hive, they will “ball” it. They cover the hornet with bee’s who vibrate their wings and raise both the temperature and carbon monoxide levels in the hive just high enough to kill the hornet, who has less resistance to these factors than the bees. Genius and heroic.
Asian hornets are invasive here in the United States but also in Europe. They are much more aggressive than European hornets, seeking out and killing honey bee hives. These nests must be found, reported and destroyed. They need to be destroyed at night when all the hornets are back in the nest.
Their stings are also dangerous to humans. Being stung a handful of times can be life threatening, even for those not normally allergic to bees. Do not try to destroy these nests without help. If you contact your local wildlife resource officer, they should be able to take care of this. Do not endanger yourself.
Paper Wasps
The wasp family is very large with many, many different species. I have a lot of respect for them – some of which is voluntary. I try really hard to be friends, a family of wasps found my cabbages one year and picked them clean of loopers. I told myself that this alone was enough to offer peace and friendship.
Some friends are harder to love than others, though. These guys are always trying to build homes that they then need to heroically defend against unarmed individuals such as myself. They are often in places that are too close for comfort for all parties, such as my shed door, in the outhouse, under the porch roof, in my outdoor kitchen, etc., etc.
As the year progresses and they become more aggressive, I am bound to get stung for minding my own business too near their nest. When this happens I sic my husband on them and any survivors must relocate. Khoke puts about a tablespoon of Dawn dish soap in an empty dish soap bottle and adds a little more than an ? of the remaining space with water and shakes it up. This creates foam. Then applying a significant amount of pressure on the sides of the bottle, he hoses down the nest onto the targets and disables their ability to fly. This will kill wasps almost as fast as Raid. The foam suffocates them, coating and plugging their air holes; if this does not get them, the Dawn also will dissolve the exoskeletons of insects which will also kill them. This is effective and not as harmful to the environment as some of the commercial sprays.
As I said, I want to be friends with the wasps as I value their contribution to the world. But we have some relationship issues.
Mud Daubers
Mud Daubers look like an anorexic version of a wasp. They are a solitary member of the wasp family that make mud tunnels which have chambers of paralyzed prey that await the hatching of the egg laid with them. The Mud Dauber larvae then feed on the paralyzed prey. If the food storage were dead when stored, then it would decompose. Being paralyzed, it is preserved by life until the egg hatches. Sounds like inspiration for a horror story that I wouldn’t read.
Mud Daubers drink nectar as adults. They aggressively hunt spiders to feed their young. I’d prefer it if they had an insatiable appetite for cabbage loopers.
Although they look intimidating, Mud Daubers rarely ever sting. I have never personally known of anyone who was. There are those who claim that they never do, but I am not going to poke their pointy behind and find out.
The greatest problem presented by Mud Daubers is not their stinger, it is their home. They scrape together a small wad of mud that they carry to their selected homesite to build the mud tunnel. They don’t just make incubation chambers for their young in their tunnels, if they can find anything already hollow they will do it there too. Often, equipment that has not been used for any length of time in warm weather, has to have the caked mud of dauber chambers cleaned out of it.
I went to use one of our leather sewing machines and found that somehow the mud daubers had gained entry and packed it clear full of mud chambers. There are two airplane crashes that credit Mud Daubers for the accident. One, if not both planes, had flown out of Florida. These were planes that had been sitting for a couple of weeks without any use. Some of the pipes had been clogged with mud from these industrious insects, causing equipment malfunction.
Cicada Killer
The Cicada Killer wasp is sometimes confused as, or called, a ground hornet, but it is in fact part of the wasp family. It looks like a darker, overgrown yellow jacket that is scary big. Thankfully, they are not known to be aggressive. This solitary wasp makes burrowing nests in the ground. The females prey on cicadas whom they paralyze for their larvae to feed on. The Cicada Killer is a large wasp, around 2 inches long, all of which they need to take on a Cicada.
A male Cicada Killer can act aggressive around a nest site but his little secret is that he can’t actually sting. Like a lot of others in the wasp family, the Cicada Killer feeds on nectar and hunts for protein to feed its larval young.
Ground Hornets
There are a number of different insects that get called ground hornets. It seems to me that anything that either looks or is especially painful is going to get the special title of “Hornet,” whether it actually is or not. Often Cicada Killers can be called “ground hornets” since they are exceptionally large and nest in the ground.
Here, in our area, there is a field wasp with red and yellow stripes that gets called a “ground hornet.” They nest low in pasture weeds and bushes, or divots in the ground. But their body conformation and nests are distinctly “wasp.”
If you get stung by one of these, they pack a punch like getting hit with a club. If you disturb a bumblebee nest, either run for your life or hold perfectly still. They tend to be motion-activated and see you when you move. These Ground Hornet wasps are heat seeking. Mess with their nest and you won’t hold still when they nail your warm little body!
Khoke tends to run into these parties when doing late summer mowing. The hornets are soon disoriented. Once their nest is moved off and gone, they disband and lose their aggression. Bumblebees, however, usually nest low enough that the horse drawn mower doesn’t actually destroy their nest, but it does disturb them. They neither forgive nor forget quickly.
Saddleback Caterpillars
Not all things that sting chase you down with wings. Here in the eastern and midwestern United States we have what is called the Saddleback Caterpillar. I’ve actually never seen one here in the midwest, they were more common in the South. These have bristles on their body that produce the most painful stings I have ever experienced.
The Saddleback Caterpillar feeds indiscriminately on a very wide range of vegetation. It is semi-common to run across them in sorghum fields. I met up with one while spiking sweet corn. Honestly, you almost never see them. You feel them first. I’ve had the privilege of two encounters with said larvae, once with my hand and once with a bare foot. The pain from these encounters is so incredible that I would rather get stung several times by a Paper wasp. That isn’t even being dramatic.
Although intensely painful, I never actually had swelling from it. The pain was rather all consuming for a little over half an hour. After it subsided, there were no ongoing symptoms like what a wasp will leave you with. If you ever have an encounter with one of these, it will restore your faith in shoes and gloves.
Stinging Nettles
Well, they won’t chase you down, but stinging nettles absolutely live up to their name: they can and will sting you. They are not thorny like thistles or brambles. Stinging nettles have needle-like hairs that are like miniature syringes of formic acid. These penetrate the skin and sting up to an hour and then itch as it subsides.
Formic acid is not only found in nettles, but it is what makes a fire ant bite stand out. Fire ant bites are small but painful thanks to the formic acid in the bite. I used to get little white blisters from fire ant bites. Thankfully, southern Iowa is too far north for their survival … yet.
Nettles, however, are a highly nutritious early spring green. I harvest nettles with gloves and scissors. Once they are cooked in any way they cease to be able to sting. These are great chopped into an omelet. I also like to dry them (this also disables the sting) and then throw a handful of dried leaves into winter soups for a little added nutrition.
Please Don’t Step On Me
The stinging things that I have discussed are by no means an exhaustive list. Among the many things that I did not cover are scorpions, from the big, bad, and ugly ones in the Southwest, to the cute, little, agonizingly painful wood scorpions in Tennessee.
As we encounter things that sting on the farms that we live on, before we raise our hand to wipe them out because we can, maybe we can pause to consider: if we actually can – by demonstrating respect – live peaceably in the spaces we share. Maybe we can recognize common goals – like those who want cabbage loopers in their nest and not on my brassicas. Or, the secondary pollinators who help my garden bear fruit in this day and age with the honey bee’s struggle to survive.
I am grateful to my great-grandmother whose lasting legacy was to teach the generations of her family, and beyond, to see their world and its smaller members compassionately. And to Tim Ramey, whose passion is not only to see that world, but to understand it and share it with the wide-eyed wonder of the young.
