My dear wife came home with a whole box full of fresh plums from her mom and the ambition to transform the same into something delicious. Yesterday, she cooked fresh jam from it, today it was a cake and some "Latwersch", another form of marmelade, absolutely delicious I admit.

So we learned that to wasps the smell of cooking marmelade is like hemp to the Californian youth or roti prata / nasi lemak to the Singaporeans. They LOVE it.

In order to protect the family (and the cake) I took them out one by one with my fantastic Chinese made electric fly squatter which literally toasts any living being it is being unleashed on. Now, generally I love animals and try to prevent them from harm, even wasps but this today was just too much. I stopped counting somewhere but they probably were a good hundred or so.

If these animals were more self conscious, what would they think? To them, out of nowhere, Hell is unleashed on them, ending the world as they know it.

Would they think this is Armageddon? Would they believe I am their God, punishing them for their sins, literally roasting them like popcorn in the flames of hell? Or would it be more like a personal 9/11, do they see me as one of their kind? Would they have anticipated this to happen, even received prophecy?

The forces from hell originate from two AA battery cells and the God unleashing them is just someone annoyed of their misunderstanding of hospitality. If they'd adopt this viewpoint or the first or none at all is just a matter of their own ability to comprehend their surroundings.

Interestingly the wasp is equipped with very powerful weaponry in form of a stinger at their rear abdomen which can produce significantly painful stings in human skin. Unlike bees, who die after using their stinger on humans, the wasp stinger can even be reused multiple times.

Taking into account that there are not one or two but a hundred of them, it would be an almost trivial excercise to eliminate me from the battle theatre, causing only minor losses to the troops. All it would take for them to do that is a bit of communication, reasoning and determination. By now we would probably be in the hospital and they would be feasting on the plum cake.

Didn't happen!

Lessons learned: (1) The weak can achieve a lot when working together but only if they are willing to and capable of making use of their assets.

Can we learn something from this?

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Picture was released under the GPL on Wikipedia.com by user SecretDisc