Bald-faced hornet nest

Other animals don’t see the world as we do. I don’t know when a hornet queen decided that this old satellite dish, trash to us, was a suitable nest site. Probably soon after emerging from her winter slumber, although it was a while before we noticed that the dish was gaining grey matter. By then it was a bustling colony. Black hornets with pale yellow markings passed in and out the entrance hole. Their bodies decorated the structure as they added paper to the advancing edges of the outermost layers. It was a little intimidating to walk underneath the basketball-sized nest on our way to my mother-in-law’s house, but they were far enough from the house to consider them part of the natural world which I leave alone.

Then one night a massive insect buzzed among the usual assortment of moths attracted to the porch light. I later found out that the hornets sometimes forage by the light of the full moon. We started to keep the porch light off, not a bad idea for reducing light pollution anyways, but the last straw was when one of them followed my partner inside. She and the baby waited in the dark while I trapped the hornet under a glass. We agreed the nest should go.

Luckily a local grad student was looking for bald-faced hornets to observe. He agreed to remove our nest. The day arrived and he and his assistant came dressed in beekeeping gear and bearing butterfly nets. They set up the ladder. The once peaceful hornets came in an angry, swirling cloud while Ivy barked through the window at the humans on her territory without an escort. The researcher swung his net back and forth among the cloud until the tail was filled with a mass of caught hornets. These went in jars, which went in a cooler. Eventually enough of the defenders were captured that the researcher was able to cut away and bag the nest.



The satellite dish, which had once satisfied a certain hornet aesthetic for a building site, was now a scene of devastation. A handful of stragglers inspected the scraps of paper still clinging to the dish, having lost their purpose in life. Right or wrong, our way of looking at the world usually prevails nowadays.