Nope, sorry, I’ve been stung by wasps as well as bees while riding my bike. I know because I’m allergic to bees, but not wasps. I’m actually not certain whether what I’ve always called wasp bites were actually wasps or hornets, I just know they were not bees, for two reasons: no allergic reaction, and multiple stings/bites.
Edit to say: I’ve rarely been stung by anything other than while riding my bike since I was a young kid; then I was usually stung while walking around the yard barefoot.
I’ve shared mine here before…
Riding my road bicycle up City Creek a few years ago, I jumped out of the saddle on one of the few steep sections. Suddenly, my face around my eyes was on fire, and while trying to flip off my sun glasses and wipe away the wasp underneath them, I neglected to pedal, fell over, landing on my left ankle breaking it. Two surgeries, a boot, a scooter, and almost 6 months of recovery.
In the middle of the summer when the venomous little bastards are all over the Canyon, I now ride somewhere else.
As a hobbyist bee keeper, and rabid hater of yellow jackets because they’re just jerks, I’ve found it’s essential to bump off yellow jacket queens in the spring. A few years back our beehive got overrun by yellow jackets in August, so we lost the hive. Yellow jackets can sting multiple times so they can take out a lot of bees. That summer a lot of people were complaining about how pesky the yellow jackets were.
I did some reading over the winter and learned that, unlike honey bees, the only yellow jacket to survive winter in the nest is the queen. The queens are about 50% larger than worker yellow jackets, and in April when it starts to warm up, will start to emerge from their underground nests to look for some protein and nectar resources and start laying eggs. When about 400 workers mature, the queen stays in the nest and gets waited on while she lays more eggs. So, the trick is to kill off queens in the spring. A buddy of mine in the Avenues and I both put out those yellow WHY traps the next spring and together we killed off a couple of dozen yellow jacket queens. In years since I maybe get one or two, and throughout all the subsequent summers the number of yellow jackets is greatly reduced. I’ve not had issues with them at the hive since.
