An Iowa Garden

Long term readers of this blog will recall that my interactions over the years with yellowjackets have been up and down, at best. I said just a couple of weeks ago, "Well, it's officially summer now: I've gotten into a yellowjacket nest and gotten stung." Liz, on the other hand, through natural sweetness or wisdom, seems to be on good terms with the insect world. It was therefore a surprise when two evenings ago while we were walking the back pathway by the ravine in our garden, she was the one who got stung on her heel. She was wearing her cute little powder blue Crocs, so I figured she had just almost stepped on the wasp, and it had stung her foot. Yellowjackets have straight stingers, as opposed to the hooked stinger of the honeybee, so yellowjackets can sting you as many times as they want.
Well, this evening I was walking up that same pathway, when the setting sun backlit a steady stream of yellowjackets, boiling out of an opening from under the brick edging right beside the path. There was obviously a very large nest, probably containing several thousand yellowjackets; interestingly, they were flying straight up in the air into an adjacent black cherry tree... I'm thinking they were probably gathering bits of bark that they chew up to expand their underground nest (which can reach the size of a bucket). I realized we had walked right through this maelstrom of yellowjackets when Liz got stung; in fact I had mowed that pathway the evening before (I seem to remember thinking that the mosquitoes were being pesky that evening). I then realized that today I had planned to trim the yew hedge that runs right along the pathway, but just hadn't gotten around to it.
I like to take a live and let live attitude towards even yellowjackets (they are, after all beneficial), and this nest will be the main source of queens to make next year's crop of yellowjackets in the garden, but we'll see... for now I'll just block off that part of the path with fence. Hopefully this won't end badly.