Field Report · Union Bay, BC

Notes from a summer of being personally selected by nature.

The second sting happened while I was sitting still. That’s the detail I keep coming back to. I wasn’t swatting at anything. I wasn’t poking a nest with a stick like some kid who had it coming. I was sitting in my own lawn chair, on my own property, and I set my forearm down on the armrest the way a man does ten thousand times in a life without incident — and an inch beneath that armrest, bolted to the underside like a secret, a colony of wasps had built itself a home. I got stung for arriving at my own chair. That’s two stings in two months now, both for the crime of being present.  Again as I just went in a vehicle finding another nest in the door jamb stinging me again.

And it’s not one nest. That’s what moves this out of bad luck and into something that feels like policy. Under the armrests of the lawn chairs. Inside the door jambs of the vehicles, so that getting into my own truck is now a negotiation. In the wood pile — which is a real problem, because I sell that wood. Cords of it. Every load I move is a workplace incident waiting on its paperwork. Notice the theme here. They are not building out on the fence line. They are not at the neighbour’s shed. They are building in the exact square inches where my body makes contact with the physical world. Armrests. Door jambs. The wood my hands go into. If you mapped every nest on this property, you’d have a fairly accurate diagram of my daily habits. Nature surveyed my routine and developed every landmark on it.

Here’s the part that makes it personal. Back in the spring I put out hummingbird feeders, and it worked. The hummingbirds came back — actual hummingbirds, hanging in the air around the yard like the place had finally passed inspection. For a few weeks I had a small good thing going, and around here you learn to enjoy a small good thing quietly, because small good things attract attention.

The wasps found the feeders. They didn’t visit; they occupied. They swarmed the ports, drove the birds off in mid-air, and mobbed the sugar like it was a liquidation sale. And when I went out there to intervene on behalf of the birds — my birds, my feeders, my sugar — the wasps clarified their position on me as well. So I took the feeders down. I had to. Which means the wasps didn’t just take the sugar. They took the birds. They took the one small operation I had set up purely to put something good back into the yard, and then they billed me for it twice, subcutaneously.

I’ve put real thought into the question of why the hell it’s me, and the uncomfortable answer is that I may have made myself smell like the economy. Wasps scent-mark food sources and they remember them. And late summer is when their whole system goes sideways: for most of the season, adult wasps get their sugar from their own larvae, which secrete a sweet reward every time they’re fed. By this point in the year the colony winds down its brood, the internal sugar supply dries up, and thousands of adult workers hit the landscape like addicts whose supplier just retired. Into exactly that desperation, I had introduced a network of subsidized sugar stations — and then shut the whole program down. As far as the local wasp economy is concerned, I caused the crash. The feeders are gone; I remain, smelling faintly of the former operation. I am the last item on the menu.

There’s a second mechanism, and it’s worse. When a wasp stings you, it deposits an alarm pheromone — a chemical flag marking you as a threat for the rest of the colony. So the first sting is not a conclusion. It’s a referral.

What this does to your head is the actual subject of this article. You start checking the underside of everything before you touch it. Chairs. Handles. Lids. You develop a flinch for anything airborne; a housefly now gets a full threat assessment. It’s a low-grade, ambient hypervigilance, and the genuinely corrosive part is that it isn’t irrational. Paranoia is when you believe you’re being targeted and you’re not. When the nests are physically real, and physically located at your precise contact points with the world, that’s not paranoia. That’s pattern recognition. The feeling is hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it: the sense that nature — the neutral backdrop, the thing that is supposed to be indifferent to you — has taken a specific interest.

And there is nobody to reason with. That’s the special frustration. You cannot appeal to a wasp. There is no process, no hearing, no desk to stand at. You can’t explain that the sugar was for the birds, that you personally ran the feeder program, that stinging the operator of the only sugar infrastructure in the area is strategically insane. A wasp does not do exit interviews. It has one tool and total institutional backing to use it, and if you object, it flags you for the others.

That’s the cruelty I’m talking about, and I mean cruelty in the plain sense — not evil, just a system that punishes exactly the wrong behaviour with total confidence. You set a table for the delicate thing, and the aggressive thing eats first. You subsidize the wrong species and it does not thank you. It moves into your armrests, treats your presence as a provocation, and stings the hand that literally fed it. Feed the wrong animal long enough and it stops seeing a benefactor at all. You’re not the guy who gave. You’re terrain. Terrain with a pulse and a smell it likes. I won’t pretend this is the first ecosystem where I’ve watched that exact mechanism run — build something good, then watch who actually shows up to feed on it — but that’s other articles.

So here’s where things stand in Union Bay. I still sell the wood; I just approach my own wood pile like a hostile inspection. I still sit in the chair, after a check I now perform with the seriousness of a bomb tech. The feeders stay in the shed, which I count as the wasps’ biggest win and my honest loss, because the hummingbirds did nothing wrong and got outvoted anyway.

But I keep one date circled: first frost. A wasp colony doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t relent, and doesn’t learn — but it does shut down on schedule. Every fall, the entire operation closes. No exceptions, no extensions. Winter is the only regulator these things respect, and it shows up annually, audits everything on the property, and revokes the whole enterprise without a hearing. I find that genuinely comforting. Somewhere under my lawn chair right now, an empire is running on stolen sugar and pure aggression, stinging its only benefactor, fully convinced it’s winning. It has no idea what November is. I do.