on the cover / By Heidi Walters

The Hornet Whisperers

The Weidert family has removed Humboldt stingers for decades, and probably saved lives

(July 8, 2010)  Tuesday afternoon was chaos at the Service house, in Eureka. In the backyard, 25-year-old Ryan Weidert, in a beekeeper-type netted hat, blue rubber gloves and a blue jumpsuit, the pockets, pantlegs and wrists snugged tight with duct tape, was kneeling in the grass as enraged hornets flung themselves at him. He slowly waved a vacuum hose, attached to a whining gas-powered contraption, to suck up the bobbing hornets, then held it steady over their nest in the ground. Then slowly waved it about again.

Inside the house, Pam Service’s 2-and-a-half year old granddaughter, Virginia, was wailing, while her twin brother, Robert, scampered about. What was the man in the scary suit doing? Who was the other man, talking to Grandma? Service told the twins the men were taking away the hornets. What would they do with the hornets? Jim Weidert, Ryan’s dad, told Service they sent them to a pharmaceutical lab in Spokane where the stingers and venom sacs would be removed and the venom turned into serum for immunotherapy shots to give to deathly allergic people. Service thought about it, then told the twins the hornets were being taken to a new home.

A just-hatched queen hornet resting on the nest. In front of her, some hornet grubs await transformation inside their paper cells — which might look like the cells of a honeybee’s honeycomb, but are only birth cells. PHOTO BY HEIDI WALTERS

GALLERY >

It had been three days of hornet frenzy here. On Sunday, Service and the kids had been out in the sunny backyard reading the book “The Big Honey Hunt.” The bears follow the bee to its hive to get the honey, and when one bear swats open the log to reveal the hive the bees swarm out to chase the bears. A real-live bee-like creature zipped past in the air, and Service said, “Look, there’s a bee.” But then she noticed a bunch of them going under a log in the garden. Uh oh, hornets. Her son-in-law sprayed poison into the log that night. Monday morning, Service went out to investigate. The log seemed morgue-quiet. “Then, like an idiot, I kicked it. And they came roaring out, and they chased me into the house. I got stung twice.”

Oh God, it hurt, a sharp burning pain. Unlike honeybees, who lose their stingers, hornets usually don’t and can sting you repeatedly. Not sure if she was allergic to hornets, Service went to the hospital. Turns out she has a “normal” — not breath-stopping, life-stealing deadly — reaction to hornet stings. Her arm’s still red and swollen.

She called the county health department, who gave her the number for the Weiderts’ answering service. As luck would have it, the Weiderts were already on their way to Humboldt County for their annual June hornet hunt. Service left her name and number. And now here they were.

Twice a year since 1973, Grass Valley residents Jim Weidert and his wife, Linda, have placed a small ad in the Times-Standard saying they can deal with your hornets and yellowjackets. It gives the number to their Eureka answering service. When they get enough calls, they head on up to Humboldt. In the spring, they primarily go after yellow-and-black Dolichovespula arenaria, the aerial yellowjacket, which builds large, hanging, alienhead-like gray paper nests under eaves, in bushes and trees, or similar places. The Weiderts also will collect the similar-looking common yellowjacket, Vespula vulgaris, the one in Service’s backyard. And in August and September, the Weiderts return to collect the black-and-white bald-faced hornet, Dolichovespula maculata, whose nest matures in the fall. Both species are yellowjackets, in the wasp family, and not technically “true hornets.”

Jim Weidert just calls them hornets — as long as he gets the right species, and gender, to the pharmaceutical company, who cares what you call them?

This year, Linda couldn’t make the trip, so son Ryan came up with Jim. By late afternoon last Monday, they had picked up their messages, phoned their callers, and were visiting nest sites around Arcata and McKinleyville. They went first to meet the homeowners and assess the nests. If the nests were in bushes or trees, Ryan, in his taped-shut suit and net hat, clipped away the surrounding branches. At most nests, he also vacuumed up as many of the hornets as he could that weren’t out foraging. They sorted those, and let the males, the drones, go; they don’t have stingers. They put the females — queens and workers — in labeled baggies in coolers of dry ice. After dark, working until the wee hours, they returned to each house to finish the job, creeping through gates and side yards to get to a nest (its remaining hornets inside for the night), wrap a cloth bag around it, then cut or scrape it free. They put each bagged nest into another bag, duct-taped it shut and put it in the back of their truck.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NEXT PAGE >SHARE