2018 A Pasture Odessey

My God, it's full of stars wasps!

Saturday, we went out to a friend's pasture to cut down some dead trees for her, and to collect the firewood for ourselves, our pastor and one of our elders.  The pastor  and his family all came along to help.  The elder's family however was battling the current flu plague, so they wisely stayed home!

We got to the area, it really is lovely there in winter.  I love the colors of the dry grasses...

We scouted out a likely suspect tree, a large dead and twisted oak, one that had fractured along the twist lines.  It was really rather lovely to look at, and to imagine what forces had caused the splits without knocking down the tree.  It didn't appear to be lightning, as there were no burn scars, and the lightning struck tree I have seen looked like it exploded (steam explosion).

DH went to town, sounding the trunk with a hammer, and then firing up the Stihl 311 and beginning to cut.  This took awhile, as the wood was tougher than expected.

Eventually though, it began to go...timberrrrrr!

We went over to the downed tree, looking for the best and safest ways to limb it out.  That's when we saw them...thousands of them!  The splits in the tree were home to a colony of red wasps!  YIKES!  And DH is allergic! And I couldn't recall if I'd left his Epipen in the cooler...

One lone wasp...

And some of his buddies!

And some more!

And even more wasps!

I looked inside the trunk only to see handfuls, literally, of wasps trying to get moving in the cold.  Thank goodness it was cold out, and they were mostly dormant!  No one got stung at all.

We got it limbed out, but stopped short of finishing cutting the main trunk up.  We were all tired, and running chainsaws when tired it not a wise idea!  Plus it was warming up, and so were the wasps.  We have decided to go back Friday, in hopes of them having vacated the tree, or if not, then we will hose them down with cans of Hate, (aka wasp spray).

Limbing it out.

Then on Saturday we will go back with a trailer and load it all up.  We might even take a second tree down Friday if we are all feeling energetic enough.  That would hopefully see us through this winter for wood.