Made a bee line to the fair; got stung by a wasp

Published 12:30 pm Thursday, August 28, 2025

The Bulkley Valley Exhibition is over and I think I have recovered, with only one small injury.

It was a busy and extremely hot weekend. I took the children to the parade first. It always amazes me how much time and effort people put into their floats. I was talking to someone from out of town and they were blown away by the parade. I told her that Smithers was a special place and she agreed. There is a certain sparkle in this town.

We went down to the fall fairgrounds on the Friday and spent the day at the midway. The temperatures soared and there was very little reprieve from the sun.

But my children had a great time. They rode all the rides and ate cotton candy and sipped extremely expensive lemonade. However, the draw of the pricey drink was that if you kept your cup, you could refill it for less money. So my oldest daughter decided she wanted to keep her cup and use her own money to refill it later.

The only downside was that I had to carry around her empty cup for the rest of the day.

The wasps also seemed to enjoy the fair. They came out in droves. It didn’t help that my kids were walking sugar traps. So sticky. I was swatting away the aggressive little insects all day, and it didn’t help that I was carrying around an empty, sticky lemonade vessel.

Wasps tend to be most aggressive in late summer and early fall because their nests have had time to grow throughout the warmer months and because of the dwindling supply of food available to them. There was certainly no shortage of food at the fair.

We went home, cooled off and decided to go back to the fair grounds the following day to enjoy the rodeo and the petting zoo. It was still so hot.

While we were sitting at the rodeo, my daughter handed me her lemonade cup that she had saved from the day before. She had refilled it, re-drank it and conveniently, re-handed it back to me.

I told her to throw it out, she ‘didn’t hear’ me and wandered off with her cousin, leaving me with her garbage.

After watching a few cowboys get thrown off their horses, I decided to regroup and went to grab the cup to throw it out. Little did I know, there was a wasp enjoying the leftover lemonade. It wasn’t happy and I got stung on my finger.

I screamed and threw that stupid cup in the air. It scared me and hurt like crazy. I quickly collected the garbage that was strewn all over and ran to find some ice— which wasn’t easy. The closest thing I could find was a cold soda. It did the trick until we got home. By then my finger had swelled immensely but an ice cube on it helped.

I can’t remember the last time I was stung. I forgot how much it hurt. I’m glad that it was me, though, and not one of my children. I am also lucky that I am not allergic. That would have been very scary. All in all, it was a great weekend and the fair was yet again, another wonderful time.