Today, dear reader, is allegedly National Bee Day, some granola-crunching, flower-crown-wearing, save-the-planet hippie holiday that’s got everyone cooing over the fuzzy little pollinators like they’re the second coming of Christ in a yellow-and-black tracksuit. And yeah, I’ll concede—bees are the least contemptible of the insect world’s miserable menagerie. They’ve got their pollination gig, their honey hustle, which, let’s be honest, is a goddamn miracle of nature, a golden elixir that laughs in the face of expiration dates. Bees, with their chubby, fuzz-dusted thoraxes and that almost endearing bumble-waddle, are the only bugs that don’t make me want to reach for a flamethrower. Kids dress up as bees for Halloween, for Christ’s sake—those little sugar-fiends know a mascot when they see one. Nobody’s out there trick-or-treating as a wasp, because wasps are the sociopathic cousins who’d steal your candy and piss in your pumpkin.

But let’s not get too misty-eyed. My general disposition toward insects isn’t fear—fear implies they’ve got some kind of upper hand, some psychological leverage. No, it’s contempt, pure and unadulterated, a seething, bone-deep loathing for the skittering, buzzing, biting bastards that seem to exist solely to fuck with humanity. Scorpions? Those armored little psychos with their smug, pincered swagger and venom-tipped tails? I’d rather square-dance with a rattlesnake. Camel spiders? Jesus wept, they’re like something Hieronymus Bosch dreamed up after a bad acid trip—eight-legged nightmares that look like they’d eat your soul if they could figure out exactly how to chew it. No fear, mind you—just a visceral desire to see them obliterated, preferably by a meteor strike.

Most insects are just evolutionary fuck-yous, pointless irritants that contribute nothing but chaos. Hornets and wasps?  There’s no justification for their existence, no ecological PowerPoint presentation that could convince me they deserve a place on this planet. They’re like the drunk uncles of the insect world, crashing the picnic, stinging for no reason, and leaving everyone worse off. Zero redeeming qualities. Zilch. Nada. They don’t pollinate, they don’t make honey, they just dive-bomb your beer and ruin your day. If I could Thanos-snap one species into oblivion, it’d be a coin toss between those two.

Even the so-called “good” insects, the ones that eat other insects, are barely pulling their weight. Spiders, for instance—sure, they munch on flies, but let’s not pretend they’re out there waging some noble war on pestilence. They’re lazy, web-spinning opportunists who maybe catch a gnat once a week, then sit there like smug little landlords collecting rent. Inefficient doesn’t even begin to cover it. A single bat could clear out more bugs in a night than a spider could in a month, and bats don’t make you scream when they scuttle across your pillow at 3 a.m.

But bees—regular, non-Africanized, star-spangled American bees—they’ve got a pass. They’re the blue-collar heroes of the insect kingdom, clocking in to pollinate the flowers that keep our ecosystems from collapsing like a house of cards in a windstorm. Their honey is a sticky middle finger to entropy, a substance so perfect it’s practically immortal. And yeah, they’ve got that cute little aesthetic going—those stripes, that fuzz, that buzz that’s more charming than menacing. You don’t see kids dressing up as scorpions or camel spiders, because no one’s writing love letters to a creature that looks like it crawled out of Satan’s anus.

So, fine, National Bee Day, I’ll tip my hat to you. I’ll raise a spoonful of honey and toast the one insect that doesn’t make me want to nuke the planet from orbit. But the rest of the creepy-crawly brigade? The wasps, the hornets, the scorpions, the camel spiders, the whole chitinous cabal? They can burn. I’m not afraid of them. I just hate them with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. And if that makes me the villain in some vegan’s insect utopia, so be it. I’ll be the one with the honey jar, laughing while the rest of the bug world gets what’s coming.

N.P.: “Switchblade” – Link Wray