Not my wasp, sourced at Pixabay.com
Lately I really feel the need to impose less suffering on other living things. Once you consciously decide to stop looking at other creatures as enemies you can find some positive feeling in the most peculiar places. Sometimes letting a mosquito have a drink on you and fly away can make you feel generous. Not that I still won't slap the shit out of those I find next to my pillow in the evening. But sitting on a meadow next to a lake in the early summer evening I feel as if I came to their turf and might as well let them do their thing. And feel generous.
But apart from mosquitoes there is another species I used to feel much aversion towards but I do not feel so any more.
Some two weeks ago a yellow-jacket wasp, also known as the common yellow stripey stingy buzzing flying thug, came through my rooftop window drawn by a smell of watermelon. Since I am lately, as I mentioned earlier, less prone to just smack the lights out of every creature that crosses my path I decided to just let it check the area and buzz off. But it didn't. Still it wasn't too boring so I left a small piece of melon to prevent it from bothering me and went about my own business. Later I noticed it was still around.
Tomorrow the whole process repeated as soon as I took the watermelon out of the fridge. And then I generally noticed it's more or less always around. It would fly out of the window for a minute or two and then it would come back and check the things. It was not too boring and was never threatening the way wasps are when they start flying nervously so that you know to get the fuck away or you'll get stung. At first I was a bit worried that we had a nest somewhere near. But it was always just one wasp.
Wife and I had a long discussions about whether it's a single wasp or different wasps coming one after another. And then the wife got a crazy idea how to solve the dilemma. So she took some correction fluid and marked it. The wasp rubbed off most of the fluid but still had enough had stuck on the border of one of the wings for it to be identifiable.
And thus life with the wasp continued. We have grown mutual respect, I mean it didn't sting us or even bore us too much and was obviously used to us because it wouldn't even attempt to fly away when we got near it. We for our part fed it with watermelon and did not chase it away. It would fly somewhere in the evening but in the morning as soon as we would take some fruit out of the fridge (and lately we eat watermelon every day) it would appear.
We started to become amused, making jokes about having a pet wasp, and wondering what happened to her to behave this way; was it transported away from its nest by a car, or was the nest destroyed? Or maybe its got fazed by those neonicotinoide insecticides that mess with the orientation of bees?
Suddenly, couple of days ago, it just stopped. It flew out of the window like it always did but this time it didn't come back. Even when I started cutting a watermelon.
It felt strange, we knew it was stupid, but we kind of missed it. We were making jokes about this strange feeling, missing the creature that repulses so many others. After all I've been stung by wasps more times than I like to remember. But still, in a strange way we really missed it. Like there was some strange little hole in us only that pest could fill. It was dumb, but it was our wasp. It was our buddy. We had some sort of understanding.
Who knows what happened to it - was it spider, or a bird, of a roll of newspapers? After all wasps are dumb little creatures for whom a window pane makes a death trap.
I don't think I ever felt so clearly the existence of a strange connection between living things (except maybe that one time I really clicked with a snail while tripping :).
But we felt we shared something with that buzzing little scary yet insignificant creep. And it really made me feel there's a mysterious connection between the carbon based lifeforms. Maybe it's the brotherhood of beings trying to cheat death out of its belongings for as long as possible. Or maybe it's because we share a huge part of the data that makes our DNA (most of which is after all encoding proteins and simple metabolic processes). Or maybe, just maybe there is some common life force animating all us; not unlike a child making funny little characters out of a large piece of clay only to mash them all back together after it gets bored.
Who knows?
But I do know I'll never look at wasps with the same eyes.
The only crappy photo I made of my actual waspbro :,(