Rugs and Hornets

[Pile of clothes turning into strips]


[8 rugs, waiting to be cut off]

The gathering is going well. People are having a great time. The last few days involved lots of little tasks: finishing and distributing our newsletter, managing the finances, collecting registration forms, working on proposals for our semi-annual meeting next week and most exciting, distributing fly parasites.

This was actually the funniest thing. We do two things here that encourage flies: use composting pit toilets, and compost our kitchen scraps. When we have large numbers of people on the land, our fly population explodes. We use many hanging bags of fly attractant to keep the numbers down, but it doesn't seem to do much good.
This year, we're trying a new technique: parasitic wasps. These tiny wasps lay their eggs in fly maggots and kill them before they mature. Here's the funny part... Word got out that I was waiting for them to arrive in the mail. In the rumor mill, tiny wasps turned into giant hornets. I introduced myself to a new visitor and he blanched. I asked what was wrong. He said, "are you the one who's going to release a swarm of hornets in the middle of the gathering?" When I stopped laughing, I told him that it was already done and they were harmless wasps the size of a fruitfly. Then at dinner circle I brought the bag with a couple tiny wasps still in it so people could see how small and harmless they are. It's funny how rumors work.



[Bag of parasitic wasps and larvae. See the tiny specks at the top? That's them.]



[Stunning Sunset]