OUCH!

This morning around 9:00, I went out to see if the cactus bees were up. They were not--they seem to be late risers. In fact the flowers on the cactus had not yet opened. I went home and had some breakfast, and then I went out again around 9:30. Still no bees, and for something to do while I waited for them to show up, I decided to try and take a segment of the cactus home to grow in my yard.

Now, you might be thinking, does everything this girl does have to include the possibility of getting stuck with a barbed spike? However, that did not occur to me until I dropped the cactus segment on my toe and learned that getting stuck by a cholla cactus quill is about 10 times more painful than being stung by a bee. And the quill is even harder to remove than a stinger. I had to pull really hard to get the biggest of the quills out and then my toe just gushed with blood (gush might be an exaggeration, but it was a lot more blood than I expected)! Like a bee's stinger, the cholla's quills are barbed, making them a bit of an ordeal to remove. In the final analysis, I am quite happy to study the cactus bees on the neighbor's cholla. I don't need one in my back yard!

My right baby toe after being stuck by a cactus quill.