Watch your step... or hand!

On Saturday DH and I were out in our garden trying to decide how to lay out a brick path that we are trying to put in. Last summer we took a lot of our bricks for the path out of the garage and made a pile of them along the fence in the garden. I made one trip and grabbed several of them and took them to the other side of the path to lay some down in a pattern. Then DH & I went to the pile to grab some more. I picked up one brick and as I grabbed a second brick with my right hand, I felt some very sharp, stinging pains shoot up my hand. I quickly dropped the bricks I was holding and cried out in pain. DH, who was standing next to me, was looking all around and asked me what happened. I didn't know myself and was looking around when I saw some wasps flying around and concluded out loud that I was just stung. We quickly went around the back of the house to the back door. I could not believe how much pain I was in. I have been stung a number of times in my life and I don't ever remember it hurting this much. I just wanted to sit down on the lawn and cry but I knew that getting my hand under some cold water would make it feel better. I still at this point didn't know how many times I had been stung and I still couldn't pinpoint where the stings were on my hand. My whole hand just hurt. When I got into the house and turned on the kitchen sink to put my hand under I started examining my hand and found just 2 stings - one on my pinkie finger and the other on my index finger. I had DH put some cold water and ice in a dish so I was able to soak my hand in ice water and then it started to feel better.

The sting on my pinkie finger must have been worse than the index finger because my pinkie finger swelled up pretty good for a few hours and the other finger didn't have much swelling at all. A short while later DH went to the store to buy some wasp killer spray and went out to look at the brick pile. He turned over the brick that I had picked up and there in one of the holes in the brick was a wasp nest. I'm still amazed though at how quickly I was stung. Another thing that surprises me is that I am out in the garden just about every day and I have never noticed any wasps flying around the brick pile. We think that there are probably more nests because the wasps are still flying around quite a bit. It's going to take a while to kill them all because it is a pretty good size pile of bricks that we are going to have to disassemble slowly and carefully.

DH did some looking around on the internet to try and determine what type of wasp I was stung with. We still weren't sure after looking at some pictures of the insects and their nests so I went out a little while later to try and get a picture of one. Needless to say that I was a little nervous when I stepped out into the garden and a wasp immediately flew up to me. I managed to stay calm though and was able to get a picture that helped me identify it as a European Paper Wasp. The identifying feature of a European Paper Wasp are their orange antenna - they are the only species of wasp (which includes hornets & yellowjackets) with this feature.

DH found a sting pain index on the internet that categorizes stings on a scale of 0-4 with 4 being the most painful. The paper wasp is classified as a level 3 painful sting while the common bee & yellow jackets & hornets are classified at a level 2 for pain (which explains why it hurt so much than other stings I've had before). Sources on the internet also state that unlike hornets & yellowjackets, which can be very defensive, paper wasps will generally only attack if the nest is threatened, which apparently was the case here...