When I was in Nevada a few weeks ago I got stung by a yellow jacket!

Dadgum thing hurt real bad for about 10 minutes, then was gone by the end of the day.

That is so funny!

Raymond comes from a large family of eight. Every single one of them have a very strong and primal (I like that word Ingram) fear of bees. You ought to see them at a family picnic in the summer!!!

Anyway, I always suspected the reaction was learned from their parents. This was more or less confirmed for me this past summer. We were at Raymond's sister's house for a pool party and a bee came flying around the vicinity of two of our neices (ages 14 and 10). Holy moly, you would have thought they had just seen a horror movie with the shrieks going on. The exact same reaction I have seen their mom exhibit anytime she is near a bee.

I have no fear of bees whatsoever (unless we are talking about an angry hornet) and they never bother me.

I used to be afraid of spiders, but not so much any longer. In fact, I like admiring (from afar) the beauty and skill of their web-making in the fall. We were watching a rather large spider making his large, intricate web one night last week. I had seen him in the same area several nites in a row. We were actually rooting for him when an insect came too close to the web.

Yeah, Saturday nites are real exciting here...

Yeah! Bee's & wasp? Forget about it!

I bought a house in Georgia built in 1946 with the old clapboard siding that tended to warp leaving gaps that wasp and bee's like to enter to build nest. On a warm day they were all over!

While renovating it early one morning I was on a ladder pulling off the clapboard siding & inside the wall right in front of my face was a huge yellow jacket nest and they looked perturbed!

I chucked the crowbar in one direction & dove off of that ladder in the other, landing kind of well... on my face. I get up & stagger off looking for the wasp spray thanking my stars that it was cool out and that they weren't too active.

dirt dobbers

I remember when I was in the 2nd grade or so, my family was in Ft Worth visiting my grandparents. Actually, Arlington.

I made friends with a boy a little older than me in the neighborhood and we went to the playground at the school down the road.

There was one of those big toys with tires mounted one on top of each other to look like a big tic tac toe board but with more than 9 tires and you can climb on them...well, I went running at it as fast as I could and jumped as high as I could and grabbed onto the highest tire I could touch...and it was one with a dirt dobbers nest inside!

Out comes a bunch of angry ones so I let go and went running around in circles and was screaming like manic chicken with its head cut off. They chased me and one wound up stinging me on one of my arms in the same place you get blood drawn between the forearm and bicep.

The thing is that it really didn't hurt that much and the bump wasn't even much different than a mosquito bite...but the thing is that for about 5 minutes I went running around acting berserk cause I just got stung until my friend told me to knock it off! What a reaction that had nothing to do with the actual bite itself! lol