You know you have PMS when...

...When you go outside and see one single yellowjacket dead inside your yellowjacket trap, and you burst into tears and uncontrollable sobbing for at least five minutes.

'I didn't think it was working,' I said, sobbing, and got the pair of scissors to cut the string that I had the trap hanging from, so I could take it down, open it up, and see if maybe the bee was still alive.

I put gloves on to make sure I didn't get yellowjacket pheromone on my hands. The trap has a cottonball inside it, with a chemical attractant that the bees can smell. But if you get it on you, .... that would be bad. So I wore gloves.

I opened it up and the little bee fell out into my hand. I touched it, hoping it would move, but it would not move, and I started crying again.

I was sure the trap just wasn't working. I had set it up while the yellowjacket nest was still very active, and they all just ignored it. The instructions said, don't set it up right next to a nest. They said it had to be at least twenty feet from a nest. I broke that rule, so maybe they ignore it if the real nest is nearby, and maybe that's why it didn't work.

But I had my landlord spray the nest, and that did get rid of the bees. I never saw any dead bees (or poisoned, struggling, still-alive bees) anywhere. I never saw anything. They just stopped going to the nest. So I just left the trap hanging up, thinking that it just wasn't doing anything at all.

I actually went outside to pick black raspberries. They are all along the pathway beside the duckpond. Since I am leaving this apartment, I won't be able to do that anymore, unless I deliberately come back here to visit. There is a parking space by the pond, and people do visit, and technically, it's university property. So I can go there if I want to. But still it will require me to drive my car to go here, when all these years (about 9 years - I moved here in 2000) I could just go out there and walk whenever I wanted to.

I was running back up the steps to get my camera, because I decided I would take pictures of the raspberries. On the way back in, that's when I saw the trapped bee and I started crying.

I don't like to kill things for no reason. I didn't need to kill the yellowjackets anymore. It's not the same as killing them and eating them, which is using them for a purpose. It's not the same as killing them to protect myself against accidentally getting stung since they put a nest directly under my door.

But grief-stricken sobbing is *probably* more of a reaction than I would normally do.

So, the bee trap has been disassembled and thrown away. They DO actually work. Just not very quickly, and not right next to an active nest.

I guess I will try again to go out and pick raspberries.