To bee or not to bee, that is the question

Kill!

That’s the reaction most people have when a bee comes buzzing around their lovely spring picnic.

I don’t mean fuzzy little honey bees or bumbling bumblebees; they don’t really want you, they just want fuzzy little plant pollen.

It’s wasps, hornets and yellow jackets that bring out the killer instinct. They’re not after pollen; they’re after you. They want to eat you. Or at the least they want to eat what you’re eating. Being Americans, we have only one appropriate response: They gotta die.

There are some really good ways to kill bees, ranging from chemical warfare to murder with a clear conscience. We’ll start with the most lethal and regress on down.

Zappers: You can always pry a big wad of cash out of your pocket and buy a bug zapper. The problem is that bats don’t like their food fried, and they’re the ones that eat the bugs you hate almost as much as bees – mosquitoes. Plus, electrocution is kind of crude and noisy.

Wasp and hornet spray: This comes in aerosol cans that shoot halfway to the moon so you don’t even have to get close. The bees drop instantly. It’s really satisfying.

Two of the most popular sprays are Spectracide and Ortho. This is like the nuclear arsenal of bug sprays. They actually work. The problem is, they also kill birds, frogs, fish, cats, dogs and people with equal ease, and leave behind a toxic residue that runs into sewers, streams and lakes and rids the ocean of sharks, manta rays, tuna fish and other cool stuff.

If you’re allergic to bee stings, this stuff is for you. Others might want to consider less planet-killing options.

Slightly less lethal wasp and hornet spray: Sprays such as The End include natural pyrethrin, the same chrysanthemum oil you use on your kid’s head when he gets lice from his girlfriend. It’s bad for bees but not bad for people and pets, and it doesn’t have much effect on birds. But you will eliminate all the fish and frogs in your neighborhood. Feeling guilty yet?

Conscience-easing killers: Sprays such as Freeze use a pyrethrin-based insecticide along with isoparaffinic hydrocarbon. That’s actually a soldier’s best friend – gun-cleaning oil. It knocks the bugs down because they can’t fly with gunk on their wings, and then the insecticide kills them slowly. You can watch in glee, but don’t step on the stricken bees with bare feet just yet. It takes them a while to die.

Nonlethal means: This method is favored by the insect rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Bugs. These devices include the Ortho Bug B Gone yellow jacket trap and its kin. You place a sweet-smelling bait packet in a plastic tube, which draws the bugs in, but they can’t get back out, so they die a “natural” death. Of course, these cost money and you have to keep buying bait packets. However, their main drawback is that they slaughter only about six out of every 6,000 bees out there.

A nicer – for you, anyway – and much cheaper way to kill bees are the variants on the pop-bottle trap. These are basically a yellow plastic bottle with a half-dozen entry points. Fill the bottom with something sweet and nasty, such as a cup of apple juice, a teaspoon of sugar and some stinky meat. Canned cat food works well for this, since its stench is even worse than dog food. The bees get in, fall in the muck and drown. Naturally, of course.

The ultimate bee trap, though, may be the simplest and the cheapest: a bottle of Mountain Dew. Drink all but a little bit of the beverage, and if you can still concentrate after all that caffeine, cut off the top neatly and invert it back into the bottle. The bees crawl in, drink their fill and die. It costs about a buck. And you can recycle the plastic, along with the bees.

To research bee killing on the Internet, Google “Spectracide bee killer.” You’ll get everything from death-to-bees tirades on eopinions.com to the National Institutes of Health bee database.

Jim Kjeldsen is a former assistant news editor at The Herald who now owns and operates the La Conner Hardware Store in La Conner.