Why bumblebees love cats and other beautiful relationships (2021)

this just made me think of the movie Annihilation where the bear like creature got a human like voice. that would definitely make a walk in the woods a lot more creepy.

The cats tear through the local bird population, rather than the rats

Even in the moment, I thought "fair enough".

Wasps are just embodied evil.

The only time I've ever heard of someone getting a bumblebee sting is when they actually got one caught inside their shirt and got three or four good zaps. They are like wasps in that their stingers don't fall out when they sting, so they can keep going as long as they have venom left.

Apparently they are somewhat less docile when it comes to other bees, apparently they can be fairly aggressive and too many bumblebees around can outcompete local honeybees.

It hurt as bad as any other sting I've ever had.

Thus I can only talk about the Common and the German Wasps with confidence. Those are not assholes most part of their short lives. They are animals and as such show predictable behaviour. Corner them, squeeze them, go near their nest, or suffocate them (e.g. breath on them) and they defend themselves. Otherwise, a busy worker wasp will just ignore you, just like a bee would.

Unfortunatly worker wasps are only busy 9/10 if their lives. The last 1/10 are a spent in a drunken stupor. Once the nest closes down the worker wasps suddenly become homeless and unemployed. Devoid of purpose, they spend their remaining days binging on sugar and fat, looking for brawls (a little bit like football hooligans). Unfortunatly the hunger for sugar and fat brings them even more in contact with humans, because we are a ready source for all of this.

Still, we can manage, most of us are smarter than them. If you have a fixed position, e.g. a porch, take packaging paper and rumple it into a football sized contraption resembling a social wasps nest and hang it somewhere visible. Wasps try to avoid other nests. If you are lucky hornets nest nearby. Hornets are usually docile, very easy to spot and avoid, but they are fierce nest protectors. They also like to snack on wasps.

When camping, sacrifice a beer or other sugary substance by putting it very accessible in a bowl a 5 or so metres away from where you are sitting. Coordinate with your neighbors if it is crowded ;) Even hooligan wasps prefer the troublefree beverage to zipping around other troublesome animals (i.e. us). Last but not least, you can almost always wave individual wasps aside. Take a sheet of paper or handheld fan and slowly produce an airstream to keep them away from that sugary pie-hole in your face.

I have only been stung once in the last 10 years or so and only because the poor thing got entangled in my shirt and panicked.

So one gets used to try to showe them away, collecting them in inverted glasses until the party is over, have something burning that might keep them way, or just surrender let them pick something and enjoy a couple of minutes pause until they take the little piece of food back to the nest (and then return).

Note also that the "continuing to pump venom" is why you shouldn't pinch a stinger to remove it - scrape it out w/ a fingernail or other item to avoid injecting yet more venom into the sting.