Smokey, With Toxic Searing Undertones

Growing up in California’s sun-baked San Joaquin Valley, my friends and I used to spend our summers whacking wasp nests out of our neighbors’ bushes with plastic baseball bats. For money. Paper wasps, I think they were. The insects infested the backyard of every house on my block. We’d show up at our neighbors’ doorstep, our little arsenal of whiffle ball bats, oven mitts, and trash bags in tow, and peddle our services—five bucks per nest removal. Amazingly, people let us in their yards, which we’d usually annihilate after tearing apart landscaping searching for hidden nests and belting furious wasps out of mid-air. We got stung by those wasps. We got stung a lot. It felt like someone shot a red-hot thumbtack out of a cannon into your flesh from point-blank range.

Justin Schmidt, an entomologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Biological Institute in Tucso, Arizona, knows exactly what the paper wasp sting feels like. “Burning, throbbing, and lonely. A