The Hornet was a Total ASSHOLE!

When I was 15 years old my parents were building a house on the 120 acres they had bought in the mountains of north Georgia. One day I was sitting at the picnic table my dad had built (everyone else was gone...to town to pick up building supplies I think)...and I was just chilling out, meditating. All of the sudden this GIGANTIC fucking hornet landed on my right forearm. Just came out of nowhere and landed on my arm. This bitch was HUGE! Emotionally, she looked about as big as my fist.

Okay, I thought. She's sitting there. I'm sitting here. If I just old still she won't sting me. There's no reason for her to sting me. I'll just hold still and wait for her to fly away.

And that is the precise moment she stung the FUCKING SHIT out of me!!!

Now, let me say right off that most stings don't bother me. All of my life I have spent a lot of time outdoors because that's where I like to be. Subsequently, I have been stung by everything you can think of: honey bees, bumble bees, carpenter bees, yellowjackets, dirt daubers, red wasps, scorpions, you name it. And because I have been stung so many times by so many critters I have built up something akin to a dull acceptance of being stung. I don't stress out when it happens and I deal with the pain easily--so easily that stings generally only hurt me for a few seconds before the pain fades.

But this hornet...oh. my. fucking. god.

IT HURT!!! Great Humping Jove, it hurt! When she stung me she immediately took flight so that I couldn't have killed her no matter how much I'd have wanted to. But that wasn't foremost on my mind. What I was worrying about was the pain!!! I cannot describe it. As I said, most stings don't bother me that much--red wasps really hurt, but even that was nothing like this.

Pain shot through my entire arm. From my forearm where she stung me all the way to my shoulder and down into my fingers. I mean, she really laid that stinger deep into my flesh. The entry point was livid with an almost blood-red target right at the center where the stinger had plunged through the skin. I ran onto the screened-in porch and found a jug of cool water and poured it over my arm, which began to swell until it looked like a ping-pong ball had been lodged under my flesh.

I didn't know what kind of hornet that was, but I have been happy in the intervening 45 years that I have never encountered another one.

This is likely the species of hornet that stung me. There is only one native species that lives in Georgia: the Bald faced hornet. From my 45-year-old memory, this looks about right. From what I've read, they're usually rather docile when compared to things like yellowjackets, but the one that got me was anything but docile.

(For a story about the time I did get a nasty scorpion sting you can go HERE.)