I don’t like spiders and snakes, and that ain’t what it takes….  Actually, snakes don’t bother me much, they try to go the other way when I am around. I have had a few close encounters of the slithery kind that I would rather not repeat, but I really don’t worry too much about them.

Spiders and their webs do get me, though. Walking around in the woods in the early fall I always carry a stick and wave it in front of me to intercept the webs. Walking to a deer stand early in the season in the dark is always a challenge to avoid webs.  I hate running into them.

Spiders crawling on me are creepy, but my worst experience with one of the eight legged horrors was one night running bank hooks. As I eased the boat into a willow tree to bait a line, a limb brushed my right ear. I felt something move on the ear lobe then crawl down into my ear.

I could not get back to the camper fast enough. Shinning a light into my ear made it burrow down deeper. We hoped it was a bug that would be attracted to the light, but the spider was repelled by it and tried to go deeper. Every time that critter moved it scrabbled on my ear drum. That is a horrible sound I will never forget.

Mama was at the camper and she had me lay my head on the table. When she poured baby oil in my ear, the spider came crawling out. I barely had time to see it hit the table before I slammed it with my palm. The whole camper shook, I was kinda wound up!

Wasps gave me a thrill while running bank hooks, too.  I eased the front of the boat under a big willow tree and grabbed a limb to stabilize it. I started to reach for the hook line but something did not look right.  When I shined the light on the big limb I was holding, about six inches from my hand was a wasp nest the size of a grapefruit, covered with big red wasps.

Luckily, wasps won’t fly at night and these did not move even with the light shined on them.

Maybe I should stay away from willow trees at night!

I can’t count the times I have been stung by bees, wasps and yellow jackets but some were memorable.  And I have been very lucky several times.

While cutting the property line at my farm a few years ago I had gone down to the end, turned and came back up. As I turned the tractor and rotary mower for a third pass, about halfway down it looked like a cloud of smoke over the strip I had just cut. At first I thought somehow the mower had started a fire.

I got close enough to see yellow jacket boiling out of their burrow and making a yellow cloud over it. If they had been faster, or if I had not seen them and ran into the cloud, I am not sure I would have survived. I am not allergic to them but do swell up some from a single sting. From hundreds of stings, I am not sure what would have happened.

Another time I walked out on my small dock at the farm to fish. I heard my dog Rip yip as he started to the dock and looked back. His black coat was half yellow with yellow jackets.  He was rolling on the ground, right on top of the nest, trying to get them off.

I ran to him, grabbed his collar and threw him in the pond and ran back out on the dock. I got three or four stings on my hands doing that.

Of course, Rip swam to the bank, got out and started out on the dock, bringing out another cloud of yellow jackets. This time Rip ran to me on the dock and I threw him back in, but grabbed his collar to keep him close to the dock and pulled him back out after the bugs left.

Maybe my worst experience with the yellow devils was deer hunting. One morning I had to go to the bathroom so I climbed down from my stand and went to a nearby tree. Unfortunately, there was an unseen yellow jacket nest at the base of it. They waited to make their presence known until my pants were down!

May the rest of your summer be as bug free as possible.