h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We spent a couple of hours in a beer garden one summer killing wasps by clapping our hands around them. You need to cup your habnds slightly other you get squishy wasp on the palms, but it really does work. It takes a bit of nerve to do the first one, but confidence will soon grow.
You need to go for a really loud clap, with the wasp somewhere in the centre.

You miss more than you hit, but we have never got stung doing this.

WASP POEM

Today i drowned a wasp that i
found floating in my wine.
Its life no longer its own,
but neither is it mine.
With cool precision turned by hate
I drowned it in the sink-
it struggled in the water
but i didnt stop to think.

i didnt feel a pang at all
i didnt change my mind
i didnt even really feel
that this was cruel unkind
if metamorphosis exists
perhaps a wasp ill be
and i wont feel resentment
if you do the same to me
i may regret the sunshine
the pollen and the jam
but ill understand youre drowning me
because im what i am
BY VERITY BARGATE



I caught a bee once and was so scared of it that I tied a wire round the top of the jar, fed it through the cat flap, shut the door and released the bee by tugging the wire.

put it in peer review with that poem in it!
can I do it?

Just thought you might like to know - an elegant glass version of the trap you describe has been made in the Black Forest for centuries. It's a sod to describe, but here goes....

Imagine a roughly spherical clear glass flask about 8" diameter with a cylindrical neck about an inch across. Now imagine a hole about 3" or 4" wide melted into the centre of the bottom of this flask, the hot glass edges pushed upwards towards the centre of the sphere so they form a raised ridge inside it just below the centre. "Weld" on three little glass feet so the whole thing stands about an inch off the table.

Are you getting this? If you stand the flask on the table and drop something into the neck, it will fall clean through the hole at the bottom, but there is nevertheless a reservoir inside the flask, accessible from above or below, roughly in the shape of a torus.

Tilt the flask, pour your liquid bait (beer with honey?) into the flask so it half fills the reservoir, stand the trap on the table and cork it. Wasps enter through the hole in the bottom and either drown, have no interest in getting out because they are having such a good time, or can't work out what to do next.

It really works. As for disposal, I don't bother - just leave it out there and let Nature take her course.... Clean it out on the next dull day when the only remaining life in it is microscopic and you won't care.

Trapping wasps? Pft! Do they not have rights? The right to freedom?
However. Dead things have no rights and the quickest and most humane way to kill a wasp is as follows....

1) Put some sugar on a window.
2) Wait for wasp to land.
3) Line up nail so that a flick will hit right between the head and thorax.
4) Flick.
5) Add wasp to trophy matchbox to see whether you are winning the annual June wasp killing contest......

That's mean.
You should keep them alive and let them go free.

Best thing to do is put on oven gloves and then catch them in your hands. Then if you're careful you can let them go outside without killing them. If not, you have to wash the gloves before your mum finds out!