Zowee.

[gothick]

Just found a wasp the size of St Paul’s Cathedral crawling across my lounge floor. Have now liberated it. Although in general such things as spiders and wasps etc. don’t bother me much, this one scared the willies out of me. I’ve put it behind a link for the wasp-averse.

Comments

[paaaaants.livejournal.com]

ANY kind of bug scares the living shit out of me! Jon's even worse. He gets up on a chair, the toilet, wahtever is around for him to climb on that gets him away from the bug! And he doesn't just kill the things. He mashes them into the carpet until they are a permanent stain. :P

SBj

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

Ewww. I'm the other way around, really. I'd be completely grossed out by killing them, so I normally feel obliged to help them outside. And I only do that with spiders if they happen to be in my way, normally; otherwise I don't mind cohabiting.

Unless they're the size of that wasp, in which case I'd probably just mistake them for a coffee table anyway.

[fatal-logic.livejournal.com]

Uh, are you even sure that is a wasp? The colouring looks very odd...

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

No, I'm not entirely certain. But I didn't really know what else to describe it as, and unfortunately I seem to have mislaid my copy of the Observers' Guide to Big Scary Winged Insects Which Look Suspiciously Like They Might Sting You :)

[fatal-logic.livejournal.com]

... And You Would Die.

There are different varieties of wasp around (or at least that's what the exterminator I had around last year told me) of different sizes and - er - temperament. I don't think it's a hornet, saw one of those at a safari place once and they're pretty scary.

Did it make any noise?

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

Well, this one, even though it wasn't buzzing about much, was indeed pretty scary. It's hard to judge the scale from the photo: let's just say that I didn't fancy attacking it with a rolled-up newspaper in case it wrestled it away and beat the crap out of me with it.

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

I've now had a bit of a poke through wikipedia, and it's possible that it's some odd kind of bee or a hornet, rather than a wasp.

Come to think of it, apart from the colour, it looks very close to this little bugger (http://www.cirrusimage.com/Bald-faced_hornet.htm).

Aha! Gotcha. It was, yes, a hornet. Play snap with these guys (http://www.warrenphotographic.co.uk/jjjwb_insects.htm) and spot the one which looks just like the one in my photo, colour included. Vespa Crabro, the standard British hornet, apparently our largest wasp. So I was right, after a fashion :)

Thank you for asking; I now know far more about wasps and bees than I knew before!