Nests Give Him A Buzz

‘Big Jack” Anderson collects bald-faced hornet’s nests. Twenty-three of them decorate the tops of his living room windows in the cozy house in Clark Fork that he shares with his “running mate” Gwen.

The sworled gray paper nests range in circumference from 8 inches to 3 feet and come complete with boughs or bits of twigs, heart-shaped cottonwood leaves, bunches of dried purple elderberries or dried mountain spray.

“I always liked ‘em when I was a kid,” said Jack. “It was one of them things.”

But it wasn’t until 15 years ago, up Johnson Creek, that he gathered his first hornet’s nest.

“A lot of people are scared of ‘em,” he admitted. “They’re mean and you’ve gotta have something to fight ‘em.”

He uses a special spray that goes longer and farther than the more common brand on the market, and watches while the hornets “go right up in the air like a bullet, clear out of sight.”

If he can reach the nest, he might hold a food strainer over the opening on the bottom and spray the nest, keeping the hornets inside. Then he cuts the nest down with “loppers,” or large pruning shears, although once he knocked one down with a scoop shovel.

“I had to climb a ladder to get that one,” he said pointing to a particular nest. “I was a little heavy on that one.”

Big Jack, as everyone calls him, will be 76 next August. Friends tell him when they see nests in the woods, and sometimes help to get them down. A friend in his early 40s, who always has been known as Bucko, “got those for me about four or five years ago,” Jack said, pointing to three medium-sized nests hanging together.

Bucko scaled the cliffs about 100 feet above Lightning Creek and dangled on a limb over the cliff in order to cut down the nests.

“I couldn’t get up there,” said Jack, who has a pacemaker. “I’ve got a bad ankle.”

Bucko knocked off his glasses and got stung six times in the process, but the three nests landed safely on the ground below.

“Them nests are tougher than you think they are,” Jack said, adding, with a pensive expression, “That’s the last time Bucko ever did it for me.”

Other than hanging over 100-foot cliffs with loppers, there is real technique to collecting. The prime time is in the “fall of the year,” when the workers and males are dying and the brood of fertilized females have hibernated in rotten logs or stumps.

On a frosty chilly morning, Jack sets out about 6 a.m. with his trusty spray can and no special protective covering. Even so, “it’s kinda hard to get ‘em,” Jack said. “Hunters shoot them and ravens eat the larva out of them and you can’t wait too long because the rain and weather get ‘em.”

Known locally as bald-faced hornets, these flying critters sometimes are called paper wasps, or yellow jackets, or even “mean old bees.” The scientific family name is vespidae. The queen of the colony starts the nest in the spring, using wood fiber that she reduces to paper by chewing. She attaches this material to a branch, or wall, and lays fertile eggs in the combs.

“When they make their nest in the ground, it’s going to be a bad winter,” Jack said. “That’s what the old-timers always said.”

This year Big Jack didn’t find any paper nests above ground. But bad winter or not, he and Gwen will eat well. He converted one of the five rooms in the house to a pantry that contains vegetables, fruit and everything from venison hash to elderberry jelly.

“I put up 800 pints myself,” Jack said.

Not only will he and Gwen have an abundance of food but the pleasure of a unique display of bald-faced hornet’s nests to admire during a long, cold winter.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: Susan Saxton D’Aoust is a freelance writer and author who lives in Clark Fork. Panhandle Pieces appears every Saturday. The column is shared among several North Idaho writers.