this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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He was sizing you up! We've recently figured out that their pin-head brains can pattern match well enough to recognize human faces. He was getting a lock on you and filing your face away in his threat matrices. :)
Tested this myself! Wasps were building a nest directly above my front dog. Pig went out the dog door, I out the regular door, many times a day. Made a point of not staring or reacting if they flew close. Zero issue for either of us. Only time they got riled up when when I got my face close and stared for a few seconds.
CAVEAT: This does NOT apply to hornets, particularly the ones that boil out of the ground. Run for the fucking hills.
I've only encountered those fuckers once in my life. They made a giant nest in a rather large sand and gravel pile on my parent's property. After a year or so of them being there, an older cousin of mine had the idea to try to take them out with slingshots. I suggested napalm.
We compromised. We whipped up a batch of improvised napalm with a bunch of kerosene and a styrofoam cooler, poured that down the main entrance of the hive extremely carefully, and lit it on fire. We then spent the next few hours taking potshots at most of the hornets that tried to flee while on fire. We made certain to kill the queen when she finally emerged, though I don't think she was long for the world anyway. She couldn't fly, and had burning "napalm" covering half of her. We still made sure to throw a large stone on her.
We did this specifically because everyone in my family is allergic to bee stings, so it was kinda an act of war for them to move into that part of our property.
Kerosene doesn't dissolve styrofoam. You're thinking of gasoline.
Kerosene is still a non-polar solvent, why wouldn't it dissolve styrofoam?
Somewhat, but not nearly as quickly or to the extent of something like gasoline, acetone or even d-limonene/orange oil (which is what I use to dissolve styrofoam packaging for repurposing, because it smells the best and is less flammable).
This video is someone dissolving polystyrene in kerosene, and as you can see it is a very slow process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1yDdIanTEA
I was a kid at the time, but I'm pretty sure we used kerosene. It was red.
She was sizing you up. It's the females who do the tarantula stinging and dragging and all the rest while the males sit up on top of Milkweed plants looking down over their "domain" for female wasps on the ground that they can swoop down and mate with.
Ground hornets pattern match too. I had a massive nest I had never noticed in an old stump. They hadn't bothered me despite having walked by numerous times. Then one time I hit the nest with the riding mower. Man that sucked. I'm not outright allergic, but a dozen stings does make me feel sick. After that, anytime I got within 20ft of the nest with the mower they would come out in force.
Then a few years later I had the same thing happen with a raised garden bed. They never bothered me and I didn't even know they were there, until my weedwacker attacked the entrance of the nest. I had to steer clear of that section of the garden for a few weeks after.
Ground hornets are horrible.