#594 – Hymenoptera

A few nights ago as I was falling asleep I thought I felt something move on my arm. I reached over and put my hand on that area but didn’t feel anything. I figured it was the typical stray hair or loose thread tickling me. I felt the movement again in another spot and brushed my hand across it to get rid of the string or piece of fuzz when much to my surprise I felt a sharp pinch on one of my fingers. “Aaaaah!” I jumped up out of bed vigorously rubbing my hands together. “Something bit me!” I got a flashlight out and frantically checked all over myself to find the source of the bite. Whatever it was drew blood and I was freaking out. Then I noticed our dog jumping around on the bed behind me. My flashlight found the focus of her attention. An ant. It was big, at least as far as ants go in this area, and it was perfectly ready to take on a dog. The dog would bounce around and snap at it and the ant would rear up on it hind legs in attack position. This went on for nearly 3 minutes until… well… the dog won. It took me awhile to calm down. As I tried to go back to sleep every little touch of fabric or gust of air sent my heart racing.

Here’s a free desktop wallpaper I made based on this comic: Biff in blue

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55 thoughts on “#594 – Hymenoptera”

  1. Jean says:

    Ants are evil.

  2. halfwing says:

    animal week?

  3. Micah says:

    Superhero animal week, Halfwing. Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Antman.

  4. SEA says:

    Living with animals week o-o

    Carpenter ant, can’t really be angry with what they can do to your house XD

  5. Samsa says:

    seriously, i’m myrmecophobic (fear of ants) and that story was TERRIFYING!!!! I’m gonna cry tonight when i try to go to bed!

  6. Shorty says:

    I seem to wake up with another mysterious bug bite on my arms every night. Maybe I taste delicious to invisible mosquitoes or something.

  7. Psymon says:

    While I share my bathroom with a black widow, I squish any ants I might find in the house. IME spiders are timid, run away if they can, bite only if necessary. Ants, on the other hand, try to be stupid heroic–individual ants make unnecessary and ill-advised attacks on mountainous creatures based on mere proximity to the nest, sometimes rousing the anger of the large beings, and always bringing attention to the nest.

  8. Chris says:

    I can deal with huge spiders and bees and hornets and beetles and lots of other things, but ants especially the ones that can bite people really just freak me out. My parents said I got bit by a fire ant when I was a baby, I don’t remember it, but maybe I’m still scarred from that trauma.

  9. RG says:

    Well this is a nice change to pests… 🙂

  10. Fafnir13 says:

    I once felt something on my face. Reached up and grabbed an ant. Gack!
    I’ve hated the buggers ever since, especially as they have occasionally infested parts of our house.

  11. trueblaze says:

    Oh man I have so many ant stories, now where to start?

    We used to have ant nests all around our house when I was a kid. So me and my brother would go around collecting bugs we found around the yard and would shove them into the ant holes and watch as the ants would go crazy trying to attack and eat the creatures.

    I remember there was this one spot in the yard where there were two different ant nests on oposite sides of a bush growing at the edge of our yard. One day me and my brother were shoving bugs down the hole of one of the nests and my brother pushed aside some grass and noticed a long line of ants marching away from the nest to some where. The next day we caught more bugs and decided to feed the other nest. While we were doing that my brother pulled some of the grass at the second nest and we saw this huge battlefield of dead ants laying beside the nest. Apparently, the two nests had decided to go to war, too bad we never found out who the winner was.

  12. Lisa says:

    The worst is waking up in the morning, rolling onto your back, and opening your eyes to find that there is a daddy-long-legs/fiddleback spider hanging less than an inch from your nose, ready to land. And subsequently rolling off the top bunk, screaming and slapping at your own face.

  13. MaskedMan says:

    I think Micah has broken the code. And I hope Biff’s new upstairs neighbors don’t hold loud parties.

  14. Charlotte says:

    This reminds me of the time a bee flew down my shirt without me realising. I felt something under moving about and had a look and freaked out when I saw the silly thing. At least I had enough sense to run indoors before taking off my T-shirt and getting rid of it.

  15. A few days ago I was watering my garden and felt something up my leg. A wasp crawled out. I smashed it and was never stung :]

  16. Chris says:

    @Samsa – So… how did you sleep? 🙂

  17. tbowl says:

    one time i felt my legs tickling… I was standing on an ant hill. 🙁 was more careful where I stood in the woods after that.

  18. Back when I lived in Minnesota, I used to play with the ant hills, because for some reason, the ants in the St. Paul area didn’t bite. Maybe they were too cold.

    Florida. Ants everywhere. Simple solution to avoid them: don’t stop moving. Even if you step right on the anthill, if you don’t stop, they can’t get you.

  19. Twilightfairy says:

    ugh.. ants. My dad tells me a story every year on how once when i was like two i fell into an ants nest. Little buggers bit and stung me till my aunts dragged me out and hosed me down. I was too small or too traumatized to remember this, but i do remember enjoying the bath afterward. They gave me one of the oatmeal baths you get with chicken pox to help with the bites and swelling.

    now every now and then in my back yard i pick up one of the more harmless ants and throw it into the local spider web, out of spite.

    I think this is where my fear of all stinging and biting bugs came from.

    Now after watching biff i think, why couldn’t it had been carpenter ants that i fell into. Instead of biting and stinging me to heck, they could have built me a doll house or something. >> or an exit sign.

  20. Julie says:

    LOL. I come from a long lince of carpenters. This comic is awesome!

  21. Chris says:

    @Julie – Hey awesome. When I was drawing this one I was wondering if real carpenters would think it was funny.

  22. Kagedviper says:

    you should make a free downloads tab

  23. Chris says:

    @Kagedviper – Yeah I was thinking about that. Maybe after I have a few more things to download 🙂

  24. KZero says:

    I’m assuming your dog ate the ant since you said it ‘won’.

    You should be careful, I’ve had an ant latch onto my dogs tongue before… and it did NOT let go easy. Very unplesant for all parties involved.

  25. Amy says:

    Ants…blergh. One time I was up late on my computer, drinking a can of Vanilla Coke. I was tired and decided to go to bed. I’d only finished about half the pop, so I left the can there to finish in the morning. The next morning, I went to take a swig of Vanilla-y goodness, and instead got a mouthful of dead ants.

  26. trevor says:

    It’s really a gamble living with carpenter ants, sure they can do useful stuff like the time they gave me a second floor, or fun and luxurious stuff, like the time they made a third flor which was entirely a maze with bouncy floors and walls, but sometimes it’s just bad or unessacary. Like the time they put a second toilet in the bathroom. What am I going to do with two toilets in one bathroom?

  27. Chris says:

    @trevor – Are they facing each other? Sometimes you can get sick where you don’t know which end it’s going to come out of.

  28. Speakerblast says:

    @Twilightfairy

    You fell into an ants nest!?

    Where do you live?

    I’d have to be about a milimeter in diameter to fall through one here in Mississauga… (Canada)

  29. FSOneblin says:

    ARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!! This be reminding me of the time when me family be being visiting Florida, arrg. Me poor sister, fell into a nest o’ fire ants, and she be allegoric! Fire ants be nasty land lubbers, arg, They hurt when they bite, they should all walk the plank, and leave nasty marks that itch and look like mesqueto’s. This be at my grandfathers house, and the next day, he mad them walk the plank!

    P.S. Happy talk like a pirate day.

  30. no name says:

    o…k. All the comments are kind of freaking me out. But thanks for the desktop wallpaper. I still have the one from #500. 🙂

  31. KZero says:

    Yar! I fergot it be Talk Like a Pirate Day! Thanks fer remindin’ me yeh scurvy dog!

  32. Deadman says:

    Ack! Going through the same thing with Skeeters down here. Freaking huge ones that were probably blown up here by Ike. Stepped outside, Me and my two dogs became a blood buffee! I’m going to have Westnile, TONIGHT!

  33. AOEUD says:

    I found a centipede in my basement one day. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep until I moved upstairs.

  34. Also, I just noticed the title and its…interesting prefix…

    I promptly dropped what I was doing and looked up the word.
    I AM GLAD IT WASN’T ACTUALLY CREEPY

  35. Scythemantis says:

    Shorty – that sounds like bedbugs, honestly.

    I’m a big insect lover. My old house had carpenter ants, and I never minded them at all. They never bit me, never ran on me at night and didn’t do any real damage to the wood foundation. I liked them!

  36. Scythemantis says:

    oh, and starseedjenny, about your wasp – maybe you weren’t stung because, believe it or not, the vast majority of hymenoptera are completely stingless. Potter’s wasps are one common example. Even most species of hive-making bee lack stingers.

  37. MadDavid says:

    A couple of times we got invaded by microscopic ants with a fondness for cat food. Our cat did not have a fondness for ants.

  38. Kbman says:

    I remember I once ATE an ant.
    (I was 7, give me a break)
    That lil’ sucker was spicy!

  39. snook says:

    When I fall asleep after seeing images of creepy crawlies I’ll get the same itch/brush feeling paranoia and visualize the foot of my bed to look like a freshly overturned log in the woods full of buggies

  40. Samsa says:

    i had nightmares about massive ants and woke up crying….

  41. trueblaze says:

    @Kbman Did you know there’s an ant that actually tastes like lemons? I can’t remember where there from, but the acid they use to defend themselves and make themselves unapealing to preditors is the same acid that’s in lemons.

  42. Pwnness says:

    congrats on ALMOST 600. oh and btw i finished all 594 in a few hours.

  43. Wizard says:

    Ants I can mostly deal with, but millipedes give me the creeps. Just wayyy too many legs.

  44. Twilightfairy says:

    @speaker blast

    I don’t know, where it was. all that my dad could say is that my face hit the ant hill, and they were all over me.

  45. Every third summer or so my dad’s kitchen has an ant infestation. We sprinkle a line of cinnamon (for some reason ants don’t seem to like cinnamon…) over all the places the come in from and flood the terrace with pine-soap water. That usually makes them go away pretty quickly, or atleast keeps them out of our foods.

  46. Oh, and by the way, I have wondered if episode #666 will have a hellish theme? 😉

  47. Draq says:

    We had a sugar ant infestation (tiny, red, come in magnitudes greater than 5), in my wooden filing cabinet. They’d get all over the house, and we couldn’t figure out where they were coming from until I left a bag of chips on said filing cabinet. I left the room for an hour and they were ALL OVER the bag.

    Unfortunately I only discovered it after eating about 20 more chips. They weren’t bad.

  48. trevor says:

    @chris:Why, they are but the ants placed them so far apart that it doesn’t help.

  49. AOEUD says:

    Yeah, I looked up Hymenoptera too… And it is etymologically linked to “hymen” – that means membrane in the Greek. Hymen = membrane, pteron = wing. That is, these are animals with membranous wings.

  50. Baku says:

    When I was about eleven I was falling asleep one night watching TV in my room and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I looked and watched for a while, convinced it was my toe or something. I was just about to turn back to the TV when a roach crawled over the lump in my blankets to stare my in the face. I screamed and leaped out of bed and slept on the couch downstairs for two weeks.

  51. Nokore says:

    ATOOOOOOOOOOOOM AAAAAAAAAANT!

  52. DaemonThanatos says:

    hehe…carpenter ants are good for something in Biff’s world, then.

  53. narwhals says:

    wow, on this comic and the last, there was an ad next to it corresponding to the animal,this one ants, the last one turtle.

  54. Marscaleb says:

    I feel your pain.
    I once had an infestation of bed bugs, and they kept me awake with the slightest touch.

  55. Madeleine says:

    The GF and I once moved into a hotel room in the evening and moved out about 1 hour later when we discovered that a whole ant people (complete with winged queen and winged ant subordinates) decided to make our room their new nest.

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