Toni, it sounds like yellow jackets that got you. They look similar to honeybees, with their black & yellow stripes & small size. They can sting multiple times & are extremely aggressive. Also, IME, honey bees are pretty laidback like bumble bees. They aren't real fast & kind of just buzz slowly from flower to flower. I can swat them away & they just buzz off contently to the next flower, not paying me a bit of mind. They only time I've seen honey bees get aggressive is when their hive is threatened. (We have a lot of wild hives up here in old trees here) Honey bees can only sting you once & it breaks off their stinger in your skin, they die shortly after. If it was truly honeybee stings, you'd have had to scrape the stingers out of your skin & you can see the stingers. Not yellowjackets or hornets, though. Those little devils can sting & sting & sting. And they will chase you! My hubby & his crazy siblings & cousins have this summertime "game" (I'd say it's kinda like roulette, LOL!) where they spray the yellowjacket nest & knock it down & then run like hell. Crazy, right? I do not participate! Love my crazy in-laws, but that's one thing I consider a little too crazy ;-) I know that dragonflies lay eggs, that's how they reproduce. I have no idea if you could order dragonfly eggs or larvae, but that's something worth looking into. I strongly disagree with the government's spraying for West Nile because it does affect the healthy bug population. And ignorant humans don't realize just how important bugs are to our planet. That spray was also linked to adverse reactions by people with compromised immune systems, elderly & young people, & people with any type of breathing conditions (COPD, ashtma, etc). Simple fact is that it's poison & there are many more environmentally friendly ways to deal with such a problem. Just one of many reasons I converted from a city girl to a country girl when I grew up...I much prefer living up here in the boonies of southern Oklahoma, with its wild natural beauty & undisturbed, well-balanced ecosystem, than in DFW with its smog & concrete & just general yuckness that they subject the population to.

I'm still very light on the JB count (thank you Lord!), but one interesting note. The few I have are in love with Ebb Tide. It was in bloom a few weeks ago when they first appeared and I would find a dozen or so on it daily. Then all EBs blooms were shot (helped by the jbs no doubt), then I had very few, some on ZD leaves, my crabapples, and other roses. Now EB is in bloom again, and the JBs are back on it! I thought they loved yellow or white roses. In fact, I do believe that because I got rid of a yellow rose (diseased) that they used to devour, that is why I don't have so many. Plus the drought, etc.

My first comments were a response directed to other comments, I would also like to discuss fuel cells. The most important issue to remember is that there is no free lunch. The H has to come from somewhere. The best place is natural gas C H4. It can also be derived from longer chain aliphatic hydrocarbons with less efficiency. You can always split oxygen dihydride (water), but as mentioned by someone earlier, this is a very inefficient process and you need lots of cheap energy (nuk power). I think that Ballard has a prototype project to place fuel cells in a large number of homes for prototype testing. I was hoping to get one for my home, but did not try very hard and just resigned myself to readily available commercial products. Solar cells are down to about $4 a Watt now and about the same for wind generators. Here are some links discussing H storage for fuel cells (or combustion). I remember reading that a company has a fully developed a liquid fuel system, based on NaB, which provides similar power densities to gasoline. It is non-flammable and much safer than any other fuel. It requires a catalyst for H production. http://www.rti.org/page.cfm?objectid=5C9D7E5B-CCCC-44F3-8124FC3A13E850F6 http://mailman.mcmaster.ca/mailman/private/cdn-nucl-l/0202.gz/msg00065.html To poohbear I enjoyed China syndrome, fun movie, in fact I like a number of JF movies, not to say that I think that she is a particularly good actress, but JF needs to realize that her politics are about as real as her movies, as are most movie stars. They seem to think that if they play someone knowledgeable, they become so ( too many people staying at Holiday Express). Many years ago when I was plant Health Physicist at Rancho Seco nuk station, I was sent to an emergency-planning meeting sponsored by the NRC. We virtually melted down the core of a nuk plant (on paper) and calculated the worst case results from a china syndrome (core melts through reactor, containment building, 40' of dirt, hits a water table producing a steam explosion and high level waste meets the atmosphere in a weather inversion. The physics of this process are well known and the probability of this occurring is probably close to the probability of all the air molecules in your room getting a bad bounce, concentrating in a corner and suffocating you to death. Nevertheless, the offsite exposure that would have resulted to the surrounding population would have been less than 5 rem (which was the annual limit of an occupationally exposed worker at the time). So much for the China syndrome. A fission device can be made from several isotopes of U Pu and Th. I would rather not go into the details of nuk devices to avoid being put on some wacko list, but I am certain that there is enough material in a reactor core to build a device. There are very few places with the equipment and expertise to do this and those that do, already have the material. For HTGR just put it in a search engine, General Atomic is working on it as well as the Ruskies, S Africa, Japan and the US. Do your homework and I will try to answer questions if you have any. To RCMJr. If you want to have a rational dialog about energy issues, which seem to interest you, you need to think more logically and less emotionally. There is a grain of truth in your concerns about mining, but consider this. Many U deposits have concentrations of ore of several percent. I don't claim to be an expert in mining, but I'm not aware of any particularly nasty chemicals used or released in the process. Au (gold) on the other hand is economically recoverable at less than 1 gram a ton or about 1 part per million whereas a percent is 1 part per hundred. It is common to use cyanide (not one of my favorite beverages) for leaching extraction. Are you worried about gold mining, chrome mining, copper mining (arsenic released in smelting)etc ad nauseum or just U mining? The mining industry has become much more responsible in this age of unlimited litigation. Most reasonable people properly briefed in mining practices would probably concur that it is being done with proper safeguards for the environment (in the USA). As far as nuk waste being toxic for thousand of years, so what? Relative to what? Arsenic, fluorine, chlorine, beryllium, mercury, lead(to name but a few) naturally occurring elements are toxic forever. Get a grip, put things in perspective. There are about 28x10E7 people in the USA and we kill about 4X10E4 in car wrecks every year, divide the second number by the first and you have about a 1 in a 100,000 chance of dying on the road. This is an extremely higher risk than dying or being injured by commercial nuk power (there has never been an injury or death to workers or the public from radiation in the history of commercial nuk power which generates 20% of electricity in the USA and has for about 30 years). The media has irrationally terrorized you in regard to radiation. The risks are much lower than hundreds of those that you take every day without nearly the benefit that you receive from nuk power. Think for yourself; don't be programmed by someone that wants to scare the money or vote out of you! There are good reasons that nuks are federally insured. In the beginning no one knew how to calculate the risk premium. It was in the national interest to get the nation energy independent (has anything changed) so the government stepped up to the plate. Now that we have turned the court system into a lottery, what do you suppose a few mrem would be worth to a jury if you can get a few $M for spilling hot coffee in your own lap. ( the power plants pay high premiums; the fed underwrites it, no claims so far to my knowledge). By the way, I consider an eco-nut as someone with an irrational fear of their own shadow (the sky is falling in)that doesn't venture out to harass others. An eco-fascist wants to take that irrational uninformed fear and control MY lifestyle. Which are you? P.S. solar cells and windmills require copper, gold silicon, chrome, lead, plastics (benzene, styrene and all other sorts of nasties), nuk power (electricity to make them) and solar cells used to consume more power to make them than they produced in their useful life (I don't know that this is still the case) not quite as harmless as you would lead us to believe. I also just read that you should keep windmills at least 100' from your home because the low frequency acoustic vibrations can make some ill (I don't know this to be the case, but the military does use this concept in some non-lethal weapons). Let me leave you with a thought, most scientists and technologists are honest, concerned, hardworking normal people. The American public has done themselves a great disservice casting doubt on these folk and trusting the elite (news moguls, politicians, eco-fascists organizations and CEO-CFO's, who with few exceptions are totally corrupted by power they have begged borrowed and stolen) To bry84 As you say, there definitely can be global warming or cooling but it is extremely unlikely to be anthropomorphic. An interesting example of how little scientific validity "global warming " has can be demonstrated by the fact that the reputed primary causal factor is not the "green house effect". A green house warms by trapping heat and not allowing convective cooling to occur. A more accurate description would be a mirror effect. "Green house gases" reflect infrared radiation back to the ground and reduce its emission into space which has a warming effect. The most important "green house gas" by several orders of magnitude is water vapor. The huge effect of water vapor is so large that the effect of the miniscule amount of CO2, less than 1%, cannot accurately be measured. Coal fired plants are a problem and may be responsible for high mercury levels in fish among many other things; nuk power could easily solve this at a better price. By the way ozone depletion was thought to be cause by breakdown products of chlorofluorohydrocarbons ( not CO2) another hoax perpetrated on us little guys. The banning of these products has cost us billions of dollars and was based on a faulty study that assumed that all the fluorine in the atmosphere was man made(whoops! how about millions of tons a year from volcanoes. CO2 is not a pollutant, but an essential part of the atmosphere. In fact, the plants call it fertilizer. The concentration of CO2 has approximately doubled over the last 100 years, but there is such a huge source in the earth's crust that it is not certain that this increase in concentration is the result of our activities. In any case it has been very beneficial to the world's flora and fauna. I have read in a reputable newsletter that there is more biomass in the old USA from this fertilizer effect than there was when Columbus took his legendary cruise W. P.P.S. I don't advocate dumping diluted nuk waste in the ocean, but the concept does help put things in perspective. AEKDB

I've been going Xeric with all my plantings. I've also found that polymer water crystals are great for potted plants. Some people are afraid of it but it allows me to grow a few, more thirsty, plants. I haven't seen any conclusive, documented, research that shows they break down into anything harmful, in amounts to be of concern. But to be on the safe side I don't use it in the food garden and I re-use the dirt in the pots. We have Bermuda grass and it is left to fend for itself. When it rains, it flourishes. When it's dry, it goes dormant. (Right now it's an invading army assaulting my flowerbeds.) The city doesn't care if its brown as long as it doesn't get too high. The HOA doesn't care, as it's a very laid-back, member run, HOA in an individualist respecting subdivision. They insist you keep junk cars and old appliances out of sight but, other than that, pretty much leave everyone alone to do their own thing. I'm the only one I know who likes their HOA. We also have an aerobic septic system and every drop of water gets treated and goes out into the yard sprinklers. I want to convert one of the sprinkler heads into a drip system but the laws are not DYI friendly and I haven't taken the time to find a work around.