The Furies

Nature is fucking HARDCORE.

When the words “Nature” or “Natural” are mentioned, one’s thoughts usually drift to things such as trees, spring air, little Swedish children running hand-in-hand through a meadow, flowers and bees.

Bees are, in my opinion, the Switzerland of venomous insects. Yes, they will indeed sting your ass if you swat them, catch them in your hands or try to swallow one whole in some bizarre Midwest-American religious ritual, but it’s like the Corbomite Maneuver in reverse; sort of “If I sting you, I die too” policy of non-aggression. Which is just ducky with me, live and let live, I say.

So I was watching the Discovery channel last night, and they had this episode on about bees and wasps, particularly the Japanese variety.

It’s unlikely that I will ever watch another nature show again.

There is a huge difference between bees and wasps. Bees are the Bothans minus the Rebel Alliance to protect them, wasps are the goddam Imperial Empire. Wasps are…Germans, I guess is the closest I could come to in comparison.

Wasps recognize no such policy of peace as the bees do, in fact, they seem to despise the bees for daring to have a stinger and not use it. Wasps can sting you dozens of times with impunity, in fact, they probably WOULD sting you dozens of times, and continue until they were nearly dead with fatigue unless you either swatted their evil asses or died in the process.

But the Japanese Giant Hornet…This is a motherfucker with wings. It’s five times the size of a normal honeybee.

FIVE TIMES THE SIZE!!

The Japanese Giant Hornet is a little bigger than the size of your thumb. It can fly 50 miles in a day. It has mandibles that can actually cut through leather.

And it can spray flesh-melting poison, usually into your eyes.

What.

The.

FUCK?!?

I really wish I was making that up for, you know, dramatic effect because goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? I could use that in the next installment of Broken Horizon. The thing here is, I DIDN”T MAKE IT UP!! Religious people in the audience, can someone tell me what the hell was God smoking when he decided Earth needed these bastards?? Was he screwing around with leftover deadly insect parts the way a kid will find something to do with spare model parts and Testor’s glue?!?

“Oh hey, lemme see, let’s put a set of jaws on this baby that can crack, walnuts, hmmm…take away any hint of compassion…ruthless killing machine, check, check…large enough to need SAM’s to defend against, good…Y’know, I’ve got this flesh-melting venom shooter I’ve been saving…well, hell, let’s slap some wings on it and call it good!”

Oh, did I mention that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that'll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive? That’s the same pheromone they use to mark their targets with, calling a handful of these bastards to then descend upon a beehive like an unholy plague of hell-born death engines and proceed to chomp into the peaceful bees like hummus in a blender set to frappe’. I mean, they don’t even need to use their stingers, they just use the living mangler attached to the bottom of their jaws.

It'd be nice to say something reassuring at this point, like "Don't worry, they only live in the Arctic, or the middle of the Sahara desert where nobody wants to live," but no, they live all over the goddamned place, including outside Tokyo. They’re all over Indochina.

Forty people die like that every year, each of them horribly. The sting of just one of these fuckers is bad enough to need emergency treatment or there is an upwards of 85% chance that you will DIE. So being stung by a couple or more?

Get right with your God ASAP. You don’t have time to see a priest.

This is maybe 30 wasps against 30,000 bees and the 30,000 bees do not stand a chance. (WARNING: This video is tough to watch. I know it's just insects, but...Put it this way, don't eat anything while you watch it.)

The video is difficult to watch as the hornets systematically capture, decapitate and continue in one fluid motion with those huge, wicked jaws. In three hours, there are piles of European bee parts that are still squiggling around because they don’t realize their heads don’t have a body anymore. Seriously. Limbs and heads and bits of things that could possibly have been alive at one point, and the hornets have stormed the hive and flown away with all the bee's children. Who will then be eaten. Alive.

Even when the bees manage to bring down a wasp or two, the don’t just die…They keep going like decapitation machines until their system just gives out.

As if to maintain their status as world-class perversion freaks, the Japanese once again prove that they cannot be outdone when it comes to finding a use for the bees. (WARNING: Same as above...This one is in a different category, but still: DON'T EAT ANYTHING!)

You can't get stuff this good on the Sci Fi channel.