\tBecause I needed it, I now have something else to worry… no panic… about.<\/p>\n
\tAt lunch today, a woman told me about GIANT wasps that live in France.<\/p>\n
\tThese are no ordinary wasps. First, she held out her thumb and index finger about three inches apart to show me how big they are. Then, she told me about how she caught a \u0093baby\u0094 one once in her kitchen which stunned the pompiers she’d called to come find and get rid of the nest of them she was sure was in her attic. (pompiers are the firefighters. If you have a nest of stinging insects, you call them and they come kill it. They apparently will also eradicate nests of poisonous worms that live here. I’ve not called them for my wasp problem since you have to have a place to have them look) Finally, she told me about how they once for no reason swarmed and attacked a woman she knows. The woman was out running when the wasps attacked her head and neck. Luckily, she was running with a local running club whose leader happens to be the chief of police in that town and he was carrying the antidote and injected her immediately, saving her life. But she did still spend a week in the hospital. <\/p>\n
\tSure, it all sounds like the kind of stuff that Snopes would dispel but there’s no such website in France. Ok, maybe there is, but it would be in French anyway so I would likely misread it and think it was confirming all this.<\/p>\n
\tWickepedia does confirm some of it. But its entry on les frelons is in, yes, French. I’m sure it says it is found in the south-west of France. Note to self: don’t go there.<\/p>\n
\tAnother site has a picture of a woman with one of these things… which is apparently actually a hornet… on her nose. It is huge. (they grow to 35 mm which according to Google is 1.38 inches) If one of those things comes around I will faint. It’s a site that claims the hornet is a misunderstood \u0093gentle giant.\u0094 Hornet propaganda!<\/p>\n
\tStill more searching (in English) reveals that this is actually the Asian Hornet, likely brought here in a shipment of merchandise. Damn global economy. At least it isn’t the Asian Giant Hornet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because I needed it, I now have something else to worry… no panic… about. At lunch today, a woman told me about GIANT wasps that live in France. These are no ordinary wasps. First, she held out her thumb and index finger about three inches apart to show me how big they are. Then, she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}