Hornets in the Garden of Stone.

The Garden of Stone is a place at deer camp where we’ve been killing deer like crazy since 2008. It is a 200 X80 yard long pasture. My big luxury box, Midway sits at one end and my favorite treestand, Campground sits at the other. Deer come out into the middle to feed. The name, Garden of Stone, comes from the fact that I started putting a small rock next to where I’d shoot a deer so that I could pace it off later. Pretty soon, there were stones all over the mid-section of that pasture.

The Garden of Stone

The guy who hays our fields has been a little remiss the past couple of years and let blackberries grow in a couple of spots. They sprouted from all the deer poop. This past Saturday, Angus and I went out to mow down the worst of it and set up some shooting lanes.

I was out on the Cub Cadet. Angus was armed with a 21″ Snapper self-propelled. I had him on the blackberries at the other end of the field. All of a sudden I saw Angus come past me at a dead run. He was running about as fast as I have ever seen him.

It turns out Angus had run over a hornet’s nest in the blackberries. He said he knew he was in trouble when the mower ran over something that nearly stalled it out and a huge plume of wasps came shooting out the discharge. He dropped the mower and ran. I went back to check. These were what appeared to be bald-faced wasps, beefy black suckers with yellow markings. There was a cluster of them the size of a softball swarming on the throttle control, and stinging the heck out of everything else on that mower. The nest was cut in two and sticking out the front of the mower. Miraculously the boogers had not touched Angus. I’m sure if he’d tripped or stopped to swat them, he’d have been dead.

We just left it there until evening. I came back with the truck. I used a grapnel on a 25 foot cord to snag the handle of the mower, then tied the cord to 50 feet of rope and the other end of the rope to the back bumper. Angus then put the truck in gear and gently towed the mower to safety. At first the hornets got mad and attacked the mower, but we left it alone about 30 yards from the nest and came back after dark and got the mower.

After separating the mower from the nest, I made sure the windows were all rolled up and proceeded to run over the nest repeatedly with the truck. That caused a cloud of hornets. Some of them stung the windshield and windows, filling them with globs of yellow goo. We then drove a half-mile back to camp and left the truck parked away from the house. A few hornets followed the truck and buzzed the house, but left us alone. When we went back, the cloud of insects was gone.

Yikes.

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