When Drunken Wasps Attack!

    The earliest apples are now just about over at my parents place. I spent a while at the weekend harvesting some of them, a cooker called White Transparent. As always at this time of year, the wasps have moved in on the ripest fruit and since this year has been a bumper year for wasps this means that half the fruit were mostly eaten already. Each one would have a hole in the side through which you could see a mass of wasps busily hollowing out the flesh.
    Not just wasps, but drunken wasps. It seems I'm not the only one who makes cider, the stomach of a wasp is the perfect place for a drop of apple juice to ferment.
    As I reached up to pick one apple the wasp-filled one next to it detached itself from the tree, bounced on my shoulder and rolled down my arm. I could see the wasps inside it spinning round as it rolled, as if in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble trying to wrestle something from Dino. For a moment I had drunken wasps being thrown from it at all angles, bouncing off my clothing to land helpless on the grass.
    It seems wasps are not belligerent drunks, I doubt any of them would remember where their sting was, let alone how to use it. I couldn't help laughing, both at the antics of the unfortunate insects and as nervous relief at avoiding so many of them without being stung.
    And all for an apple pie which with luck I'll be making this evening. I hope my wife enjoys it, given what I had land on me to secure it.