BILLIE
Welcome, everybody, to this summertime edition of “Billie and Bernie’s Subdivision Stories,” the definitive podcast about living in the suburbs. Glad you could join us. We have a fun program today; in fact, it’s about something most of us probably have never seen or heard anything like it! Last spring, you might remember, we had Dr. Feiffenberger on the show from the University, and the subject was wasps. That’s “wasps,” the common, ordinary backyard pest… well, it’s a pest because it’ll sting you if you give it half a chance. That’s how it always seems, anyway. Wasps are undesireable guests at any warm-weather outdoor gathering, which is how folks usually experience them. And though we understand that wasps are magnificent creatures in their own way, and they help to control other backyard pests, and that they’re just little insects after all, it’s their world as well as ours… really, they can be very annoying to people and pets, and persistent, and a little scary. While one sting, on your arm, or your neck, is painful…
BERNIE
Extremely painful.
BILLIE
Yes, extremely painful, but not only that. Wasps have a habit of responding quickly and in great numbers to aggression by humans—
BERNIE
Aggression that you may not even know that you’re being aggressive.
BILLIE
That’s right, they do have a short fuse, that’s for sure. What they do is, the wasp who’s in trouble sends out a kind of distress signal, which just empties the nest, in your direction, and they come after you in droves, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, depending on the size of the nest, all at once.
BERNIE
All at once, and don’t bother trying to run away, they can fly faster than you can run.
BILLIE
And that’s when it can get dangerous. But anyway, one of the last things we touched on during that podcast… it was when we were getting more theoretical, more philosophical almost…and what we were talking about was, how do wasps feel about all this, or about anything? Do they think or feel anything at all?
BERNIE
They feel nothing, I guarantee it. Sorry, but I’ve had some run-ins with bees over the years—
BILLIE
Not bees, Bernie. Wasps, remember?
BERNIE
Yeah, OK, wasps. Not bees. Not honeybees. Honeybees are all right. They make honey! They won’t bother you, and anyway they’re too busy doing an honest day’s work. If they do sting you, they can only do it once. But wasps: I really don’t like them at all. To be honest, Billie, this is a challenging show for me today. It’s all I can do to sit still. But I told you I’d see it through, so OK, here I am. Wasps just really give me the willies—
BILLIE
I know it but hold on, let me set it up for our listeners. What if, just what if, wasps have some sort of consciousness about themselves, a self-awareness… some ability to discern things, some kind of an inner life? We might think—
BERNIE
Fffff! Billie, are you kidding? An inner life? Let’s be honest here. They’re just bugs!
BILLIE
Oh, it could be, Bernie… But! Maybe not. How do we know for sure, one way or the other, until we look into it? It would kind of change things, wouldn’t it? If wasps were conscious of their own behavior? That’s why scientists do research, to find things out. What do wasps themselves know, in their little heads, and taken together in their big nest of many individuals? Are they aware? Work with me here for a second. Do they think? Do wasps think?
Now speaking of being aware, we didn’t know this at the beginning but Dr. Feiffenberger’s research group has been working for several years on a sophisticated system combining entomology—
BERNIE
That’s the study of bugs.
BILLIE
Very good, Bernie, you’ve been reading again. Yes, the study of insects. And also, radical new innovations in audio engineering, combined with automated foreign language translation software, and the result, they say, is a system that captures the utterances of wasps, and translates them into your language, making them understandable to humans, like us here in the studio, and you listening at home.
BERNIE
And making our words understandable to them. But don’t ask us how it works.
BILLIE
No, that’s the good Doctor’s department. We do know that the system in fact works. They’ve already tested it on moths, and on cockroaches. From what I gather, the moths put everyone to sleep, and the roaches were rude. Today it’ll be our turn, with a wasp that we captured this morning out in the parking lot. Pretty exciting, don’t you think? Our intern Leah was very brave. So today on the show we’re going to be doing a demonstration.
BERNIE
Oh, goody. And no, we haven’t rehearsed this. Heaven forbid.
BILLIE
Well, Dr. Feiffenberger and our producer thought it might be fun to just take a chance and see what happens.
Now, besides me in the studio, and Bernie here, we have with us a wasp we’ve decided to call Muriel. Her Latin name is Vespula alascensis, a species better known as the common yellowjacket. Muriel is on the table in front of us, just inches away, under a bell-shaped jar of clear glass. There’s a microphone inside the jar and some blockish things of black plastic on top, and all these tiny black wires running in and out and some blinking blue lights, and a small speaker. I need to say that Muriel can’t get out, and won’t get out, until we let her go tomorrow morning. Because even though I like to think she’s being a good sport about this, she’s clearly agitated, and if she could get out she might try to sting us.
BERNIE
Ya think?
BILLIE
Oh, and Muriel really is a female. The yellowjackets that you see around your yard are all likely to be females.
So let’s give it a try. Hello, Muriel!
I said, hello in there, Muriel! Can you hear me?
MURIEL
#!$7@*!!
BERNIE
Ehhh— she doesn’t sound too happy, Billie. Not that I blame her.
BILLIE
Just a second, hold on. Hello, Muriel! It’s me, Billie, and Bernie! We’re not going to hurt you! We’d just like to talk with you!
MURIEL
@!#$%&! #!&@T$! #!$7@*?!
BERNIE
I can picture this going sideways pretty fast. Tell you what, if she makes any trouble here, I’m not afraid of her. I’ll just reach right under there with this can of Raid and kick some yellowjacket butt!
BILLIE
Now, Bernie—
MURIEL
Not we kick your butt first, Bernie!
BILLIE
Wait— what was that? Muriel! Did you say something?
MURIEL
Not “you.” “We.”
BILLIE
How’s that? Not “you”?
MURIEL
Don’t call us “you.” Call us “we.” We here. We are here. Let we— let us out of this bottle!
BILLIE
Wait a minute. So, you’re not a “you”?
MURIEL
No. We are we. Listen to us why don’t you and try to get it straight.
BILLIE
OK, OK, we’re listening.
MURIEL
With us, it’s no individuals. No “you.” We are we. We live. We fly. We work. We eat. We fight. We fight and we kill, too! We no play around. You fight one of us, pretty soon all of us come join in. See how you like that.
BILLIE
Well, you’re understandably upset about being cooped up in there, but you’ll be going home early tomorrow, and in the meantime, can’t you see what a fantastic opportunity this is for you to tell us and everybody listening about yourself, in your own words? How about that?
MURIEL
f&%T$#!@k
BILLIE
Please, Muriel, let’s just try. You and I together. Just for a moment. It could be fun! OK, Muriel?
Tell us, if “we” can— um, if you all can, about your life, your daily life. All of you. I mean, “youse,” I guess…
BERNIE
Holy mackerel…
MURIEL
(takes a breath) We here long before you, OK? You understand? We here first!
All we want is meat. Protein, call it. Just like you. We don’t live so very long. Still, ours is beautiful life, under the sun. We feel its warmth. Every day we eat to stay alive, and we feed our babies. We no slouches. We stay in shape! We no get fat! You ever see a fat yellowjacket? Hmm? Can’t hear you, Bernie.
BERNIE
Not that I recall, Muriel, and let’s not get personal.
MURIEL
So. Then. We do a good job in your garden, too, we clean up bad bugs eating your flowers. If you leave your cheeseburger and soda out where we can find them, we going to go after them too. Protein. Sugar. We must eat. Just like you. Otherwise, we want nothing to do with you! All we want is to be left alone. But no. You see a couple of us, you come after us with fly-swatter, with smoke sometimes, then poison, big poison. The thanks we get. Our babies die, queen dies, nest fall apart, our home. After all that, any surprise we got short temper? We got short temper OK but we got long memory. Good for us. Not so good for you.
You! We see you, think we don’t? You live, too. You work, you eat. You mess with us, all the time. One day, you die.
BILLIE
Oh well now Muriel. You die too, don’t you? Every autumn, at least up here in the north. Isn’t that right?
MURIEL
(sniffs) We die. Yes. But not she. She sleep all winter. She wake up in the spring. She will live. She lives!
BILLIE
This is just amazing… Yes, your queen winters over, that’s true.
MURIEL
True. Yes. Very true. She lives, and so we live. We live through her. So we not die. We not die as if, gone forever.
We here long before you. We here long time after you gone. When you go, you going be gone for good. The last of you. Out with you! No queen for you, no.
You let us out of here this instant!!!
BERNIE
I’ve heard just about enough from this bug. Why, if I had a rolled-up magazine—
BILLIE
No! Now, sit down, Bernie! Muriel is our guest.
BERNIE
Billie, excuse me but why are you being such a pushover? Can’t you see she’s a pest, pure and simple?
BILLIE
I thought you were the one who didn’t want to get personal! Look, Bernie, the way I see it, this is an unbelievably historic, practically first-time-ever chance to talk one-on-one with an insect. More than that, an insect known only to most people as an annoyance. So let’s not blow it. There’s a long history of antagonism between people and yellowjackets; this is a chance for us both to get below the surface, find out more about each other. Cool off a bit, take the anger down a peg. Up to now, we’ve done most of our talking with cans of insecticide. They’ve done most of their talking with their stingers.
BERNIE
Well— yeah! My point exactly! They’ve stung us. They’ve hurt us, they’ve hurt me, that’s for sure. Last time they pounced on me, I was just walking across my lawn, and next thing I know I’m in the ER. It wasn’t a good time.
BILLIE
Oh! I didn’t know it was as bad as that, Bernie. Maybe you should have sat this episode out.
BERNIE
No, no, I’m glad to be here, if only just to trot out some opposing viewpoints. Now, you take a look at this wasp.
BILLIE
Muriel.
BERNIE
Yeah, OK, “Muriel.” She and her kind spoil thousands of picnics and backyard barbeques every summer. They build nests under your roofline, in a corner of your garage that you never think to look at, in some abandoned mouse-hole in the backyard. You don’t go out trying to provoke them. You don’t even know they’re there! And all of a sudden you got ’em all around you, rocking from side to side as they line up for a shot. Ughh! Is that worth the good they do?
BILLIE
Bernie, I can tell you had a very bad time with that bunch of wasps. Now, I have to ask you. Are you sure they were really yellowjackets, like little Muriel here?
BERNIE
Yeah! You bet they were. I think so, anyway…
Well, now… wait a minute. Sheesh…
You know, come to think of it, maybe they weren’t. Maybe... to be perfectly honest, I guess they were the, whatever… the black and white ones, big guys.
MURIEL
Ah-HA!
BERNIE
You shut up!
BILLIE
Bernie! Muriel! We’re all in this conversation together!
Yes, so what you’re saying is that it was bald-faced hornets that attacked you. That’s really just another kind of native wasp, isn’t it? They’re not true hornets. And they’re not yellowjackets either. But it’s true, they’re big, and fast, and very aggressive.
MURIEL
And nasty, very nasty, those guys. Ughhhhhh!
BERNIE
Wait— so you know them? Well of course you know them. And you don’t like them either?
MURIEL
We know them, yes. Make me shiver! They way too hot for us neither. You never see us with them. No like them. They give me the willies! We stay away from them!
(draws a breath) Bernie, I just thinking. You are like me, in a way. You wary, you quick to anger, you don’t trust. You territorial. I get that. We— we admire that. We not so different from you.
We—
BILLIE
Yes, Muriel?
MURIEL
We— I sorry, Bernie. And it was the bald-faces anyway, not us, so I can’t say we sorry. But I sorry. Whoever does the attacking, it is painful and frightening. I know. It’s supposed to be. But still, you weren’t doing anything wrong, from what you say, and you were caught by surprise. No fun.
BERNIE
No, not much fun.
MURIEL
(after a pause) I sorry, Bernie. You seem like an OK guy underneath all that fussing and fuming. It shouldn’t have happened. I wish for you that it hadn’t.
BERNIE
Why, thank you, Muriel. I appreciate that.
BILLIE
Bernie, I do believe that the show is having a moment!
BERNIE
Well, you know, come on…
They’re OK, I guess, yellowjackets. Seeing as how it wasn’t Muriel’s fault. They’re beautiful, in a way. I’ll admit that. And tough, too. Let’s be fair, they’re certainly badasses! And what do they want? They’re like us, just as Muriel says. They want family close by, and sunny days to enjoy, and something to eat and to feed to their young. You know that farmers benefit from yellowjackets too, in that they help to keep agricultural pests down.
BILLIE
Bernie! You have been reading!
BERNIE
Oh, yeah. Well, sure! I wanted to come to the show prepared, right?
So, us and the yellowjackets and all the rest of the wasps, and really everything else like that, the sharks, the bears, those stinging jellyfish… when we bump into them or they bump into us, it’s not so good. As long as we don’t bump into each other then it’s OK, but when we do… It’s nobody’s fault, I guess. It’s a nice big world out there with room for everybody, but sometimes when we meet…
MURIEL
Not so good.
BERNIE
No, not so good.
BILLIE
Well, friends, we’ve got to wrap up a most unusual edition of “Subdivision Stories,” and I’m sure we’ll be having more conversations like this at another time. Be sure to join us next episode when we’re going to be talking about—
MURIEL
Billie? Bernie?
BERNIE
Yes, Muriel, what is it?
MURIEL
I— um— what time is it?
BILLIE
Time? Oh, right now as we’re recording this, it’s about seven. Seven in the evening.
MURIEL
Ah! So dusk is coming soon?
BILLIE
Uh, yes. In about an hour.
MURIEL
I think maybe you want to wait to go home. OK?
I think maybe you wait to leave for home, for another hour or so. Maybe a little bit longer. No hurry along. No rush-rush. You take you time. Just relax. Here. Indoors. With me.
BERNIE
Any special reason, Muriel?
MURIEL
Ah— um— I just— when you started the program today, I… I sent out my distress signal.
BILLIE
Oh.
BERNIE
Uh-oh.
MURIEL
So, ah— now we waiting for you. Plenty of us. Plenty, plenty. As long as the sun is still up in the sky.
I sorry, I really am. But right now all of us waiting for you two. Outside.
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