MUTANT INSECTS MENACE US ALL!!!

You think I'm kidding.



I know you do.



However, I'm not. And they're not killer bees, either.



Ever see a yellowjacket? Yellowjackets are carnivorous wasps, living throughout the American south, to a lesser extent throughout the rest of the eastern US, and other areas worldwide.



Nests typically can grow to the size of a basketball, (the stereotypical "hornet's nest" you often see in old cartoons) containing a single queen and up to 3,000 individual worker / soldier wasps.



Until recently.



Now, reports are beginning to come in from the south that huge, really huge, FRIGGIN GIGANTIC, nests are being found.



How big and scary? Well, as big as a Volkswagon, and containing up to 100,000 wasps.  (A note: sorry about the registration. Just lie to them; they don't have a legal right to ask you for any personal info anyway. Or better yet, use BugMeNot.)



How, you ask?



Apparently, yellowjacket queens have learned to cooperate, allowing them to build multi-queen nests of truly monstrous proportion. Of course, this is being blamed on global warming - "it doesn't get cold enough to freeze them anymore, so now they don't die," but in reality, it doesn't freeze that hard or that often in Georgia and Alabama to kill them off in large quantities anyway. The change isn't in the weather, despite the reporters' ill-informed yammerings; it's in the species, and it's horribly, horribly dangerous.



Yellowjackets are a bitch anyway. I've been stung by one, and it hurts like a sonuvabitch. One sting can swell up your whole arm into a welt the size of a golf ball. Now imagine 100,000 of them attacking you. It could happen; yellowjackets emit an alarm pheromone which alerts other workers of the hive to attack when they are frightened / disturbed / swatted at / pissed off. The kicker? They have straight stingers; they can sting again, and again, and again.



Ok, all of you with bug phobias can get the creeping ickies now. The rest of us are probably going out to buy some RAID for Flying Insects.