Quote:
Originally Posted by cmac2012
Dang, and I thought I had to jump through some hoops to get away.
It's hard to make a good estimate on how times I was stung. I'm guessing 20 at least but more likely toward 50 or more. They can sting multiple times and I couldn't rush my way down to the street too much, needed to hold roots and the like on the steep slope or could sprain an ankle or worse.
So they had maybe 30 seconds to work with little swatting. I'm almost thinking I had to kill nearly all of them in that swarm to bring it to an end. I keep my wallet in my left front pocket and at one point I saw 3 or 4 dead ones sitting on top of the wallet, which will often catch falling debris such as bits of drywall being cut overhead. In a weird way it was sort of invigorating. No major damage but there was a definite struggle for survival of some sort going on there for a few minutes. Felt that way briefly anyway. 
The shortcut wasn't the best idea but I'd had to do shutoffs twice already and wanted to streamline the process. Absent wasps would have been a time saver. I wish I'd had the ball cap on when the swarm was going. My hair's pretty short now and they were going at it. I saw a few settled on my shirt sleeve before dispatching them. No idea if any of the stings made it through clothing, though a few minutes after I thought I felt one on the back of one knee - took off my knee pad, which I further fasten with electric tape, and from the back a dead wasp fell to earth. |
Iv always thought that these wasp and bee stings feel what a powerful but lower powered imaginary LAZER would feel like if one was the target. The damn near instantaneous fire hot burning sensation happening simultaneously in multiple spots on your body. It happens so unexpectedly and with such severity it completely focuses your mind and your body on STOPPING THAT **** FROM HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!
That instinctive response has a get way of clearing one's mind of all the crap we think about virtually all the waking minutes of our lives!
Very interestingly that same sort of clarity inducing reality is kind of like what happens when you're rock climbing. Your survival demands you focus on such a tiny array of circumstances so completely that after you get to the top of a route and you can draw back and relax it's almost as if the climb has forced/allowed your brain to flush out so to speak, it can be quire refreshing. I suppose many activities that demand such focus could have similar effects.
You're quite lucky you didn't have a severe allergic reaction, a couple stings could have put you in anaphylactic shock and you might of died there in the brush on that side of the hill, it's happened that quick before to people.
I've got a younger brother that was stung many times by yellow jackets after he laid a sweatshirt down on the ground under some apple trees that had dropped some fruit. We used to play baseball on an adjacent open field, getting dark play ended, he went and grabbed the sweatshirt and pulled it over his head, about 10 seconds later he starts hollering and going into crazy contortions reacting to the pain of the stings, took another 20 or 30 seconds to realize the sweatshirt had to come off because that was the root of the problem, it was full of yellow jackets trapped against his skin!
Same brother la couple years later was poking a very large White Faced Hornets in their large paper ball nest, knocked a hole in it, hornets come out extremely angry as evidenced by the weird sounds they make when that happens. My brother takes off running, he was one of the fastest runners in the neighborhood, except he was looking behind him and he mis-stepped because he was running forwards and occasionally looking behind him when he stuck his foot down into an old septic tank opening. Needless to say that spectacularly stopped his forward motion, and the sharp edge of the masonry surrounding that opening ripped the skin from just above his ankle where it first caught off his shin front and up into a big bunch just below his knee cap. Gruesome right down to the bone itself, he spent the rest of that summer sweating in the heat because he couldn't get the wound wet while the rest of the kids went swimming everyday!
Around here the skunks are the natural limiting factor for the yellow jackets that ground nest, the skunk will dig deep into a nest destroying the colony, they usually do that at night, you can see the damage the next day.