Apples and Wasps

The bake off was about the apple. Personally I love apples. I love to eat them, but mostly I love to cook with them. There is a cake or a windfall scone or pie. They are lovely. You do have to worry about length of life as the products don’t last so long. I love an apple cake but for me and R to eat one before it goes off, we have to be committed. Although as we are in October and Halloween is just around the corner I may have to pop one in the oven. Actually we have guests so I may make an apple cake.

When I lived on the smallholding we planted trees. Actually when my parents bought the smallholding the land was pasture. There were no paddocks or fences or anything like that. We planted 150 trees, mostly in the rain. A lot of those trees were apple. Now, they bear fruit and my mum groans as she looks at buckets and buckets of apples, all needing peeling and processing into pie mix. Those apple trees I have seen grow from tiny 2 year old sticks to ten foot high trees.

I do remember one year going out to pick the Bramleys, I’d been working on the latest book so had put it off until the sun had gone down. I grabbed my basket and ran out. It wasn’t cold, a mild night but there was a load of cloud cover so it was dark. I thought about going back for a torch, but although it was almost too dark to see I knew where I was going. I planted these trees. I guess it was a bit spooky but I was walking in my space, the place there I’m meant to be. There was no sound except the haunting call of an owl. Even my dog had decided not to join me. I was where I was meant to be and life was pretty good. I reached the tree and twisted one of the large apples. The branch didn’t even twitch as the apple popped off.

There was a faint feeling on my shoulder, like a leaf had fallen off. But it was autumn, so must have been a leaf. I picked another. Something hit the ground. I squinted in the gloom but heard nothing. I could see nothing. I picked another and pretty soon was just ignoring the leaves. Quite a few hit me and I felt tickling near my eyebrow.

You know that point in one of the Indiana Jones movies where the heroine has to walk over the bugs and then she gets covered in them?

Well, I put my hand up to wipe the leaf away and instead the leaf clung to me. I looked at my hand and there, clinging determinedly to my palm, was a large wasp. Wasps are my nemesis. I don’t like them. They are big and have a tendency to be bad tempered, especially in the autumn.

Although if you think about the life of the wasp you can understand the anger. I mean they are born/hatch and they help with the hive until they are no longer needed around the end of September or beginning of October. Then, and here is the kicker, the Queen kicks them out of the hive. She goes off to do Queenly things and the drones are on their own. This means they are looking for food for themselves and what do beings do as soon as they are left for the first time on their own? They seek out sugar or alcohol. The high protein healthy diet they were on is thrown in the trash and they go after anything sweet.

Of course this means you can be sitting quietly in a pub and suddenly half the patrons will stand, flap their hands and scream. It will be a wasp, trying to get at the drink or food. Drop a piece of jam into a narrow necked beer bottle though and the wasp will enter and leave you alone (you can use a coke can as well). But if you think about it, that wasp has just been made homeless, jobless and directionless. They have lost the reason they were created and why they got up in the morning. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that they turn to sugar and alcohol?

So, at the tree I have turned my hand and there, sitting on it, is a large wasp. It looked HUGE, although I have a feeling it was my fear making it appear much larger. I froze and for a second and realised that the wasp wasn’t moving, not even doing the tail bob that they do. This thing was frozen. So I did what any normal person would do. I screamed and flipped my hand in the air madly.

It fell off.

My hand hit the tree and three or four ‘leaves’ fell around me.

Only my brain, my fear induced brain, started to work and a small voice suddenly suggested that they may not be leaves. What if they were wasps…

All of them?

I had been hearing them fall the whole time I was picking apples. I look at the tree. There were 3 apples left, all out of reach and all needing me to reach up to grab the branch in order to shake them off or pull the branch down so I can pluck the apple from the end.

I looked at the tree carefully but it was really dark.

I was at this point that my phone buzzed. I’d forgotten I had bought it with me. Reaching into my pocket I pulled out the phone and switched on the torch. I pointed at the basket of apples. Nothing there just that it was too full.

I took a breath and pointed it at the tree. There was the problem. Every branch, every nobly branch, every branch I had seen in silhouette as twisted and old, was covered in wasps. They were almost nose to tail. They were all over the tree.

I didn’t turn the light on myself. I had no wish to.

“Okay,” I wispered.

Keeping the torch on the statue-like insects I backed up, grabbing the basket with my free hand. I backed from that tree until I was out of its branch reach. Then I turned and walked today the house. The tree was about a hundred feet from safety. As I went I shook, not in shock, but on purpose. I shivered and shimmied. I ignored any drops or noise and swept my hair into the wind, shaking my head.

Walking into the sudden light, the kitchen and the smell of cooking pie.

“Apples,” Mum said with a smile.

“Wasps,” I countered with.

It wasn’t until much later, a change of clothes and a shower later, that I found out after the sun goes down the wasp and the bee simply stop. They sleep when the sun has gone down. I think that if I had hurt the wasps then they may very well have stung me, but they didn’t because they were asleep and luckily I was able to shake them off.

Even today though I can’t peel an apple without giving a little shiver. Wasps are not my favourite insect and yes, I do flap my hands if one is insistent on bothering me. In our much smaller garden we have two apple trees, one close to the house and one further away. Neither, so far, have been found by wasps, but then locally we have far more solitary bees than wasps. Our apples are free of wasp damage and I am free of them falling on me when I pick the apples in the dark.