Note: this post was originally published in 2007 on OpEds.com. Its relevance today should be obvious.
Living in a rural area, one has to
cope with the fact that private property is a human invention, only
respected by some (but not all) humans. Other species may be
territorial, but claims are made and defended only by bluff or
violence.
I have been doing battle for years with carpenter bumblebees. Left to their druthers, they'll eat up your exposed rafters and beams on your buildings by drilling tunnels all through the lumber. Fortunately, although these are very territorial, they apparently don't sting. They do engage in a lot of bluffing, however, which can be quite intimidating until you realize that it is just a bluff. They'll swoop at you at high speed, and then hover a couple of feet away, looking you right in the eye.
Carpenter bees also have a behavior pattern that brings me to this story. They post sentries at various locations within a hundred yards or so of their home. A sentry will hover at the apparently assigned location until a intruder, usually another insect, comes by. The sentry will then chase the intruder, or if it is a larger animal, make a few swooping passes and try to stare it down, as described above. At the time it hovers in front of you, it is vulnerable to being swatted if you're quick enough.
This provided me with entertainment one year. I decided that a tennis racket would make a great bee swatter, and would allow me to improve my reflexes at the same time. So I would stand at one of the sentry locations and wait for the sentry to hover in front of me. With considerable success, I was able to knock them down with the racket and then stomp them if they weren't dead.
This went on for a couple of weeks, during which I kept count of how many bees I had killed. The problem was, there seemed to be an unlimited supply of sentries. As fast as I would kill one, a replacement would take its place, sometimes as quick as in a minute or two. After about 65 kills, I finally decided that they were reproducing faster than I was killing them, so I changed my war plan. I went down to the outbuilding that they had infested, waited until nightfall and they were all home asleep, and caulked all the holes up. This did not completely eliminate them, but it eliminated most of them for the rest of the summer.
The moral of this story is clear. Until I took out the source of the problem, I was making no progress in eliminating the problem. The analogy with Muslim Jihad is a no-brain-er. Until we eliminate the source of the 'insurgents', terrorists, or whatever you wish to call them, they will just keep coming. Until we plug up the holes, we will forever be swatting bees.
