Davis removing a hive from a deck joist on a client's home in Macungie. Photos: Alejandro A. Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS
When Bret Davis was a child, a swarm of subterranean yellow jackets attacked him, and the pain from those burning-hot stings stayed with him long after the swelling went down.
For years, Davis worried about wasps and bees, even common house flies when he was outside. Any flying thing that buzzed past his ear made his heart race, and that old fear returned like it was happening again.
"So I decided to do something about it, to get over that fear,” he said.
On a recent, scorching July morning, Davis’ black truck rolled to a stop outside a large home tucked into the woods in this small, rural town, south of Allentown in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.
He put on a thick, mesh suit and tucked the pantlegs deep into his boots. He donned thick leather gloves, grabbed a mini crowbar, a ladder, and his only weapon, an everyday wet/dry vacuum. It’s the kind you’d use to tackle a flooded basement or spilled Cheerios, but you don’t need a protective suit to tackle cereal.
Up in a roof deck, about 50 yards (45m) away, some flying insects flew in and out of a tiny opening, back to their hidden nest and the Hornet King was coming for them. The homeowner, his wife and a friend, sat in chairs from a safe distance in the garage, their phones ready to record the action. The family said no one was getting stung but it only took Davis a few seconds to see these were no bumblebees.
Davis holding a male Dolichovespula arenaria, or aerial yellowjacket.
"It’s dolichovespula arenaria,” Davis said, staring up at the underside of the deck. "They’re yellow hornets – but most people just call them yellow jackets.”
If you were willing to get close enough, you’d notice the nest smelled like burnt waffles.
Davis, who is still a licensed nurse, took his fear of wasps and hornets into his own hands with this makeshift exposure therapy in 2018. He bought a stingproof (well, sort of) bee suit and began taking videos of nests near his home and posting them online.
"Then a nurse colleague saw the video and said, 'Hey, I have a nest for you, if you want to expose yourself some more’,” he said.
Not only is Davis, 38, now cured of his phobia, he’s also tapped into a life-changing social media honeypot with more than two million followers on a slew of channels. How life-changing can wasps and hornets be? Davis prefers not to discuss all of his financials but said in his first month on TikTok, videos from his hornet_king_official account made him about US$34,000 (RM150,400).
"Just turn on a camera and point it at something you’re interested in,” Davis said. "My mum watches videos of people organising closets.”
A picture of an aerial yellowjacket hive before removal.
"You can’t prepare yourself for how big those things are,” he says of the hornets swarming around a room in the video.
That first viral video has more than 10 million views on YouTube and he’s posted about a half-dozen other videos there with over five million. One TikTok video of yellow jackets in a ground nest, Davis’ original arch-enemies, has been viewed nearly 40 million times.
"I love finding a new phobia,” one commenter wrote after watching.
Davis, who is married with one child, said there’s no formula to virality, no matter how hard influencers try to chase it.
"Mostly it depends on what else is trending,” he said. "I think another video was pushing viewership and I just kind of struck while the iron is hot.”
The algorithms of the Internet will push other insect content your way if you watch Davis’ channel. There are channels where people purposely get stung by everything from scorpions to tarantula hawks, a large wasp that preys on something just as scary: tarantulas. Other videos show drones ramming into hornet’s nests or blasting them with flames. Last year, killing wasps with a cup of gasoline was big on TikTok and denounced as wildly dangerous.
Davis overcame his fear by facing it head on.
When Davis gets stung he doesn’t scream in pain or writhe around on the grass like other social media stars.
"They do that for clicks,” he said. "I’ve been stung around 100 times. It’s not as many as you would think.”
Like any successful social media channel, copycats have grabbed their vacuums and suits and rushed headfirst into the literal hornet’s nest. It doesn’t bother Davis all that much. He doesn’t have a copyright on the process, but he’s not exactly going to give budding wasp and hornet removers a lot of advice.
"I’m not going to tell you what to do or not to do and have to be responsible for that,” he said.
Davis charges a minimum of US$120 (RM530) for service, but it varies by location and the complexity of the nests. He’s travelled as far as Alabama and Georgia to remove nests and regularly works in Maryland and Virginia. Still, he doesn’t consider himself an exterminator. He uses no chemicals besides soapy water in the bottom of the vacuum.
He uses that vacuum to suck up every wasp and hornet – they’ll keep coming back to the hive until he’s got them all. Then he removes the nest, takes it back to his home in Lancaster County, and feeds the larvae to his chickens, an emu, a rhea, which is considered a South American ostrich, and a squirrel named Belle.
"Their primary diet is more like insect meat. They love grubs and worms and, obviously in this case, they love larvae,” Davis says in one video of his chickens pecking away at a nest.
Some of Davis’ videos feel like horror films, particularly when he’s uncovered a nest inside a house and there are hundreds, possibly thousands of wasps or hornets buzzing in the room while he vacuums. He said it’s natural to be a little nervous in those situations, but it’s no longer panic-inducing or a personal indictment against the insect.
"I know that when they are attacking that’s what they are supposed to be doing and they’re justified,” he mused. "It’s not just that they are a**holes with wings.”
In Macungie, the yellow jacket nest was relatively small, a few hundred perhaps and Davis had it removed fairly quickly. He wasn’t even filming and the crew filming in the garage got more of an entomology lesson than chaos. No one, including this reporter and an Inquirer photographer, was stung.
Everyone got to smell the comb, which takes on the waffle smell because of pheromones.
Davis said he still pinches himself from time to time about his life trajectory, how a fear of flying insects turned into a full-time job.
"I just had the wrong insect.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer/Tribune News Service
