Even though they fly around, we've never been stung in the 3 years that we have shared our dwelling with the honeybees. Friendly bees, I presume. For some reason I began to try to recollect the last time I was stung and I dredged up out of my memory a time as a boy that some wasps tore me up. My grandfather called them guinea wasps. They were small, but don't let the size fool you, they were angry, aggressive and made me cry like a baby.
Image Credit |
Image Credit |
Thank the Good Lord for Joe. Joe worked for my Dad and Grandpa for many years. What a guy! Joe's vice was chewing tobacco. Cussing was another. He could cuss a blue streak, but that's not relevant to the story. Joe didn't have a favorite brand of tobacco. He had two favorite brands of tobacco and he would mix them before chewing it. From his pocket he would pull out a pouch of Five Brothers Pipe Smoking Tobacco:
Image Credit |
Image Credit |
Well, Joe was sitting on the porch of the camp as I came running up, wailing, and he told me to calm down. He had just the remedy to cure the sting. Forget Benadryl! That's for city folk. He had something better. He promptly pulled a big, wet, slimy, soggy, brown wad of chewing tobacco from his cheek that he had been chewing on and he pressed it on my already swollen calf. I looked on in horror as the warm, brown juice ran down my leg, staining my white tube socks. I'm not sure how this old remedy works, but supposedly, tobacco has a highly basic composition and it counteracts the acidic nature of a sting. All I know is that it worked. A good herbal remedy, for sure.
In about five minutes the stinging sensation ended and all the pain disappeared. The swelling went down, the tears dried up and all was right again in the world. Except for the guinea wasps. But old Joe had a remedy for them, too. I walked to the shop with him and he pulled out his pocketknife and cut the top off of a Dr. Pepper can. He then filled it half full of gasoline and we walked back to the scene of the crime underneath the combine shed. The guinea wasps had settled down by then and were back on the nest. With precision rivaled only by maybe Nolan Ryan, Joe threw a perfect strike, tossing the gasoline so that it saturated the nest, killing all of the wasps. We looked at the "frozen" wasps lying underneath the ladder to the old combine and Joe gave them a good cussing. Then we walked back to the camp. Sitting down, Joe pulled out his pouch of Five Brothers and Levi Garrett and began mixing up another batch of chew. In the event anyone else got stung, of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment