Bennett, I know what You were going through. Bought ten years ago, We had a bush hog that got some metal pushed into the blade and it was slamming every time the blade came by. We welded a piece of chain onto the bent sheet metal and Dad told me to pick a tree to hook to. I picked a stout cedar along a ditch bank. He backed up to the tree, I wrapped the chain around the base, and he started pulling the sheet metal away. The tree jarred a couple times as he was bumping along as to not go too far. I was bent over getting ready to unhook from the tree when I noticed out the corner of my eye what I thought was a horse fly on my arm. I found out quick it was a ball faced hornet.

About the time I realized what it was after he was able to drill a 1/4 inch hole in my arm, I heard dad scream RUN! Well Momma didn't raise no fool and I never took time to look and made Forrest Gump proud. As I was running, I felt one barely able to tag my back as my shirt was flapping in the wind. I ran across the shop yard from one end to the other (6 acres) and stopped and 3 zoomed by my head so I went back to running. Finally they stopped.

I had red streaks on my arm where the first hornet tried to find china in my arm (still have the scar from that one) and dumped a bunch of poison. When Dad yelled scream, he dumped the clutch on the tractor and just ripped a whole hunk of metal off of the bush hog and drug it on across the yard. He got away unscathed. He came over to check on me by the water spigot as I was running water over my wound trying to make the pain ease off some. He said he looked back at the tree when we were bumping it and He said My whole head disappeared into a black cloud of hornets. I was lucky I did not get eat up by them. I can't imagine what the pain would have been like with 20 or 30 stings from them things.

I put a chaw of tobacco on the wound and killed the pain and then it hit me. I saw red. I went back to the tree and found the paper nest which was bigger than a basketball. I went and got a double barrel 12 gauge with about 3 boxes of shells and commenced to blowing that nest straight to he77. After the first box, there was nothing left of the nest. The hornets would swarm and then settle down into a ball on the limb where the nest was. I would then shoot the wad of hornets. I kept doing this until the limb fell off the tree where I had shot it so many times. There were only about 4 hornets left on the stump of the limb and then I blew them away. I felt much better after that.

A couple days later I was riding down a farm path and found another nest on the path. I went back home and got the 12 gauge and took care of that one. I know a chemical could have done the job more efficiently but I was furious. Something had to die by force. They did not stand a chance.CF