Cardboard Bed And Hornets

A new bike carrier arrived in a cardboard box that is about 24" by 36" and maybe 5" deep.  I took all the parts out and haphazardly set the box on the floor between two cat beds made out of the fluffy stuff cats seem to love.

The cat beds are designed for cats and are only for cats and our three have slept many hours in each one.

However, our oldest cat, Twinkles, who is 16, promptly climbed onto the box and has made it his new bed ever since.  I'd like to throw it away, but hate to with Twinkles evidently in love with it.

Cat behavior is often surprising and nearly always endearing. So why would he prefer the box to a soft, just-for-cats cat bed?  Only he knows.

Saturday, I was carrying yard debris to a utility trailer we have and noticed hornets flying by in both directions at one point on the route.  I stopped and traced the ones heading in the direction of our house to a hole in the ground just off the deck.  The number or hornets arriving at and departing from this hole was impressive, a constant stream in two directions. A hornet nest this large near a home is dangerous so I knew I would have to kill them.  I marked the hole with a 2 x 4 and came back after dark with a can of Ortho Hornet and Wasp Killer spray.  

Coincidentally I happen to be reading a book by Richard Rhodes about the development of the atomic bomb.  As I was spraying nasty chemicals down the hole I kept thinking of what Robert Oppenheimer said as he was viewing the first atomic bomb blast, ""Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."  It's from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita.

I certainly was destroying the only world the hornets knew.  The next day I didn't see a single yellow jacket leave the nest, but I did notice several return, but they only hovered in the air near the entrance.  They seemed to know that landing meant death.  It struck me that these stragglers were hornets that left the nest near darkness the day before and had spent the night away from home.  Fortunate in a way, I suppose, but now they had no home to return to and no idea what happened.