A run-in this weekend with angry yellow jackets under a tree outside my house caused me to cascade rapidly through the three stages of post-sting grief:
1. How do I stop the pain and swelling?
2. What’s the least humane way possible to destroy these evil creatures’ nest?
3. Why do yellow jackets defend themselves so aggressively?
After taking care of those first two practical concerns, as most of us who have tramped through the pine forests or flower gardens of South Mississippi have done at some point, I dwelled a little longer on the third and more philosophical question. From a little research online I learned that yellow jackets become a problem around now — late summer and early fall — because that’s when their population grows.
Every nests starts out in spring with a single queen. She lays her first eggs and takes care of the larvae until they emerge. That initial generation helps prepare the next and so one. It takes several months to have a large nest, and then all the workers die off completely by the first frost. A few queens hope to survive and look for a place to winter and begin the cycle again.
My question is this: If you only live one brief summer, why use it to risk your life defending the queen and your nest, even though it usually means death for you at the hands of your attacker? As anyone who has been attacked by yellow jackets knows, they’ll chase you for very long distances, long past the point at which you were any threat to their nest, in their unbridled zeal for protecting their home.
If it was me — and I obviously don’t have the mind of a yellow jacket — my attitude would be, “Y’all can have this place. I’m outta here to enjoy this short life while I can.”
Yet yellow jackets are among the most social of all creatures. Truly they could not survive as a species if they did not work together: The queen is dependent on the workers to grow and maintain the nest, while the workers rely on the queen completely to reproduce another generation.
If they took on the me-first attitude that I described above, the results would be catastrophic. The queens, abandoned by their children, would starve. The workers, although free for a time, would die without contributing to the future survival of their kind. Despite their limited intelligence, yellow jackets are willing to sacrifice their own best interests for the greater good because they somehow understand that that’s most beneficial overall.
I look at it this way: Even though yellow jackets’ lives are very brief from our perspective — just a couple of months — that’s all they have. That nest is their life’s work, and they are going to make sure it’s protected. Securing its future is the most important thing. Applications for humans are clear.
Our lives may seem much longer to us than those of an insect, but truly they are nothing overall. As the Bible says, we are a vapor that appears for a brief time before vanishing away. Think of the myriads of generations that have passed since Adam, with most all of their deeds and names long since forgotten.
So would it be better to spend our limited time trying to boost ourselves and serve our selfish motives or to seek out ways we can serve others, even if it comes at some cost to us? That second approach to life is more difficult in our individualized culture, but it’s a better way to live. It ensures the future success of mankind after we’re gone.
And to think all it took was those yellow jacket stings to make me realize that. There’s another lesson learned: “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope (Rom. 5:3-4)."
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at (601) 736-2611 or csmith@columbianprogress.com.
