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Hello, this is Ben with Ben’s pest control. And it’s time for another one of our Ben’s pest control podcasts. And today I want to do an episode on stinging insects on the Treasure Coast. Now, everybody hates stinging insects. Obviously, when you get stung or when you get bit it hurts. And I do want to state that there there can be a difference between getting stung by something and getting bitten by something. But what I want to do is I want to kind of start with the stinging insects and here on the Treasure Coast. Let’s start with the flying ones. First, we do have bees. We have honey bees, and those fall into two subcategories you have the European honey bee, which is the most common and that’s the one that’s in my opinion usually less aggressive, they will aggressively defend their hive, but usually they have to be agitated or made angry before they will aggressively go after people. But it is possible. And then you have the African iced honey bees which are infamously known as the killer bees. Now with both of these bee species, they have a stinger and they will sting you and it will hurt. Now the African eyes honey bee when they sting you they actually release a pheromone, telling other bees in the colony to also sting you as a defense mechanism to protect their colony from you. So that’s a big problem because a lot of times when you’re dealing with Africanized bees, people can be stung multiple times. And we’ve done an episode on bees, I’ll just kind of try to give you a summary real quick. If you are stung more than once by a bee say two or three times you need to run away, you need to get as far away from that hive as you can usually once you run outside of 100 yards from the hive. The Africanized bees will leave you alone. So I usually tell people to run 200 yards if they don’t know where the hive is to get as far away as possible. So we do have the bees. Another thing we have here on the Treasure Coast and it’s not as common but we do get yellow jackets. We have had to go out into the country before and treat Yellowjacket hives, and they’re a very aggressive Wasp like insect. Not again, extremely common, but they do exist. And they seem to really like to nest in the ground. You got to be careful with the ground nests. Again, a very dangerous, dangerous pest. But we have a whole family of wasps. wasps are another one and the wasps. wasps are kind of interesting because you have paper loss, you have mud dobbers they kind of all fall together for me, I’m sure that the entomologist would say they’re two different insects. But for me, I mean they seem to be very similar. Now what I have found is with the Wasp, the smaller the loss, the more aggressive they seem to be. And then when it comes to wass, the bigger the nest gets, the more aggressively they will defend the area around their nest. So if you have a paper wasps nest that a lot of people get usually by their front door, their garage, and it’s the size of a quarter and there’s only two wasps in it. A lot of times they’re not going to go out of their way to be super, super aggressive and attack people. But if that nest gets bigger, maybe the size of a baseball, I’ve seen some as big as Frisbees, there’s more wass and they will more aggressively defend the area around their nest. Now, one of the things that we have here on the Treasure Coast is that a lot of people don’t realize and I would say I’ve seen only a couple and that is we do have scorpions. Now the two I’ve seen were both in Jensen beach. For those of you who don’t know Jensen Beach has what I can sitter to be quite a large hill that it just kind of looks like it’s a huge sand dune and where there is a preserve kind of just south of Jensen Beach Boulevard, what you see is just this massive area of sand. And the sand
is an environment that the scorpions really like. Now when I worked in Fort Lauderdale, we had scorpions and a lot of those scorpions were around the beaches in Fort Lauderdale. As a matter of fact, Fort la Lauderdale has a famous wall along their beach, there was a time when they used to say if you had taken like a toy shovel or a shovel and you had dug the sand next to the wall, you’re more than likely going to find scorpions. But we do have some around here. And the last one I saw was actually last week again in Jensen Beach, in a house with a crawlspace. So they do exist, you got to be careful now, scorpions are dangerous supposably from what I have read and understand that I have never experienced this scorpions in Florida stinging you they claim is very comparable to a bee sting. Now me personally, I don’t intend to find out, I don’t intend to go test the theory, I would just warn people that they gotta be very careful, because you just don’t want to go out of your way to, to have that interaction. And then of course, if a person is allergic to anything that stings, they could be deadly to to them in general. And, and you surely don’t want that either. I mean, you don’t want to have an allergic reaction to something that stinging you, that would be a problem. Now, one of the things that I tell people is that the imported fire ant, the fire ant mounds, the big ant mounds, they actually sting people, they have a stinger, and they sting. And the burning reaction is the reaction to the I want to call it poison or venom, whatever the that is in there, it is bad, and it causes that sensation. But they, they also have a stinger. And that that’s kind of problematic, because obviously, you don’t want anybody getting hurt, but the fire ants can sting you over and over. Because there’s so many of them in a colony, I mean, a mature colony of fire ants, I believe can have 250,000 ants in it. So that’s, that’s a big problem. It’s very dangerous, and they have killed people here in Florida. So you’ve got to be very, very careful. Now, one of the things I really didn’t go into too much, but there are definitely a whole list of insects in Florida that bite and biting isn’t quite the same. And I’m probably going to save that for another episode. But Biting is not the same as stinging you. And so not that it can sometimes in any case, hurt any less. But it’s it’s usually a little bit less irritant as some of the Steens accent actually leave a stinger in your body. Now, I would tell you always if you get stung, consult your doctor. Be prepared to go to the the emergency room if you if you have to. But get yourself checked out by a medical professional. There are some at home things that I have seen that that can possibly help you I know there was a there was a video once I saw about bees thinking where if you took a credit card and ran it across the top, you can pull the stinger out with the credit card. And that way you’re removing the stinger and that way. That way you’re protected. So this is Ben and I’m with Benz pest control. If you have any questions or if you’re afraid that you have any of these insects on your property and you need them checked out or removed, please feel free to give us a call at 772-878-1972 and I’ll be happy to talk with you. And we’ll get you set up for one of our free 58 Point inspections. And we’ll go from there. Thank you and I hope you have a great day.
