Wasp Removal

[Bootstoots]

Obviously if you're going to spray sulfuric acid everywhere, you'd want full PPE. And not to mistake it for water.

Truthfully, that sort of thing could have happened to me in my full-on mad scientist phase last year. I'd run out of glassware and end up using drinking cups from time to time.

Then again, though, it's not possible to drink a strong acid and not immediately detect the extremely sour flavor and try to spit it out. Daddy might get part of a mouthful before spitting it out and realizing with horror what he'd done, and then try to rinse his mouth out as it corroded. The result would be severe burns and tissue damage throughout the mouth and lips but probably nothing fatal. If some were swallowed it would cause severe damage to the esophagus and possibly stomach, but still survivable with modern medicine.

It's pretty hard to die of acid or base exposure, even to the mouth, but very easy to be permanently maimed. That's why they are so popular among revenge-seeking jilted ex-lovers and the like - the attack maims the victim but rarely kills her. In a way, the goal is to be crueler than murder - to leave them alive, but severely disfigured and suffering for the rest of their lives.

I've licked up little droplets of straight phosphoric acid (weaker than H2SO4 or HCl, but still strong enough to be corrosive), fairly concentrated sodium bisulfate (similar to phosphoric in strength - it's a half-neutralized version of H2SO4), and relatively dilute HCl. All are intensely sour and HCl in particular has the same acidic taste as vomit - mostly because stomach acid is HCl.

Here's my overall review of the acids I've played with at home, ranked by how much I liked using them. I'll also include a couple of acids I've not played with in brackets, with my expected rank.

Spoiler Bootstoots' ranking of acids :

1. Phosphoric acid (H3PO4) - The safest acid and still strong enough for most uses. It's viscous enough to not end up getting everywhere, doesn't damage clothing, doesn't reduce or oxidize anything, and so on. Mixtures of it with trisodium phosphate (TSP) can form three great and cheap buffer solutions at convenient pH values of 2, 7, and 12. Only drawback is that it's a weak acid, but it's not very weak.

2. Sodium bisulfate (NaHSO4) - Much like H3PO4, this is a weak-but-still-pretty-strong acid. It's an acid salt rather than a liquid, which has benefits and drawbacks. Can be used for most things H3PO4 can be used for but not quite as versatile.

3. Nitric acid (HNO3) - Now it's time for a big leap into danger. Nitric acid is fun and can be quite dangerous. Many metals dissolve to form their nitrate salts, which are always very water-soluble and can be quite pretty (copper is a beautiful blue, cobalt a deep red, vanadium is blue at first [it's V(IV)] but can be changed to different colors by adding oxidizing or reducing agents). Mixed with HCl, it makes aqua regia, which can dissolve gold, palladium, and platinum. Mixed with H2SO4, you can nitrate things like cellulose or glycerin, which you can then use to have a blast (please don't make more than a few drops). On the other hand, the dissolution of metals releases copious amounts of highly toxic nitrogen dioxide, a red gas. If you do this inside, you may die. I have done this inside and did not die, but it was with pretty small quantities and I was still an idiot. Points deducted for dangerousness, but still awesome.

4. Sulfuric acid (H2SO4) - Ah, the old workhorse acid. This stuff is more dangerous and more annoying than some other acids because it dehydrates everything, including carbohydrate molecules, turning them into soot. Working with it more or less guarantees holes in your clothing - and prevention of holes is the main reason people wear lab coats. But it's strong, dependable, and helpful for some reactions where you want to remove water to drive the reaction forward. Dissolves some metals to form sulfate salts. Oxidizing when concentrated but not as much as nitric acid.

[5. Hydriodic acid (HI) - Presumably even better than HBr. Illegal because it's used to make meth. Plus, HBr is enough for most non-meth purposes. So don't produce this one.]

6. Hydrobromic acid (HBr) - Like an improved version of HCl. This stuff is slightly less volatile than HCl, and it's more fun to brominate molecules rather than chlorinate them because Br comes off the molecule more easily than Cl. And it replaces things like OH- more easily because Br- is a better nucleophile. Great for making alkyl halides. Slightly reducing. Hard to find but can be produced with some effort.

7. Hydrochloric acid (aka muriatic acid, HCl) - Very cheap, and doesn't do anything weird like oxidizing things or dehydrating them. The main drawback is that it's really volatile. The molecule HCl is a gas dissolved in water, and it comes out quickly and obnoxiously, creating corrosive fumes everywhere. Don't store next to any metal things you care about - even an unsmellable amount seeping out from a store-bought bottle will corrode things over time. Can be used to create chloride salts of some metals, and to chlorinate some organics like t-butyl alcohol. Used in aqua regia. I mostly avoided it and used phosphoric where possible, but sometimes you do need HCl.

8. Glacial acetic acid (CH3COOH) - The smell is obnoxious and penetrating, as you'd expect from 20x concentrated vinegar. But it does have some uses like making esters. Then you get fruit smells instead of vinegar smells.

9. Caro's acid, aka piranha solution (H2SO5, plus unreacted H2SO4 and H2O2) - Made by (carefully!) mixing sulfuric acid with concentrated hydrogen peroxide. As its name implies, this stuff eats just about everything except glass and some strong plastics. Even small amounts of graphite or soot can be destroyed, oxidized straight into CO2. Among the most dangerous things I've ever made. But it's great for cleaning glassware!

10. Formic acid (HCOOH) - Augh! The smell is penetrating. Somehow it just smells like corrosion. It's the acid ants inject into you when they bite, and that's where the name came from. Even brief contact will cause your skin to break out into burning hives. It can be used to make carbon monoxide by mixing with sulfuric acid, in case you feel like making toxic gases.

[11. Perchloric acid (HClO4) - Known for exploding unpredictably at concentrations above 70%. Strong oxidizing acid, but seriously, just use nitric, or piranha if you're crazy. Geologists use it to chew up rocks though.]

[12. Hydrofluoric acid (HF) - Such an interesting acid, but I ain't touchin' it. When most acids contact your skin, they just sit there for a few seconds and give you time to rinse them off, then start eating you slowly so that you might get only a little burn, and take quite a while to chew fully through the skin. HF is different. The molecule, being technically a weak acid and chemically resembling water, easily and quickly penetrates deep into the skin, severely damaging everything on its way down, including the nerves that would communicate pain. Then it releases its fluoride ions into your bloodstream. The F- then reacts with calcium in your blood to produce insoluble CaF2. Your heart needs calcium ions to operate correctly. So if you got too much HF, it will go nuts and then shut down, and you die. Also, it's volatile and can do this sort of thing to your lungs.]

 

[Bootstoots]

For completeness' sake, I'll put up bases too. It's a very similar list. I'll put it in a spoiler too because I'm all about symmetry.

None of these are recommended for wasp removal. Or WASP removal for that matter. If you try that, more WASPs will come and arrest you. Although there won't be very many WASPs on the inside, so there is that.

Without further ado:

Spoiler Bootstoots' ranking of bases :

1. Sodium carbonate (aka washing soda, Na2CO3) - A very useful, very cheap and easy to obtain, not very dangerous base. It's the conjugate base of sodium bicarbonate aka baking soda, and it functions basically as a stronger version of bicarb. It's just strong enough to cause the usual base reactions like saponification (soap-making) of fat, without being too damaging to skin. I always carried a solution of this stuff with me when messing with acids, as the fizzing provides a perfect indication of when the acid has been neutralized. Downside is that it's not all that strong.

2. Trisodium phosphate (TSP, Na3PO4) - Much like sodium carbonate. Great for making buffers with phosphoric acid, and phosphates help fight rust as well. No fizzing, obviously; the phosphate stays in the solution, which can be a drawback because phosphates of other elements are often insoluble. Also weak; marginally stronger than sodium carbonate.

3. Sodium/potassium hydroxide (lye, Na/KOH) - The main workhorse strong base. Perfect for just about every reaction that calls for a strong base. Doesn't leave anything but alkali metal ions in the solution you're working with. Cheap and easy to obtain. The only drawbacks are related to its strength - it's much more dangerous than the first two. The solid or (especially) concentrated solutions can easily cause severe burns, which get worse than acid burns because they destroy proteins by hydrolysis and turn any fat in your tissue into soap. Choice of NaOH or KOH depends on the use, but for the most part they're interchangeable.

4. Ethylenediamine (NH2-CH2-CH2-NH2) - This isn't a general purpose base, and it's kind of toxic and smells like a mix of ammonia and rotting fish. But it's a very interesting compound in a couple of ways. The first is that it can be reacted with some organics and make stuff with interesting coordination behavior, like EDTA. But this pales in comparison to my favorite use for it, which is an analogue of the Birch reduction (see ammonia, #7) but stronger, done at room temperature, and thus far not discovered (or not found useful) by meth-heads, AFAIK. You take lithium metal and add it in. It dissolves and forms a deep blue solution with solvated electrons - free electrons buzzing around doing their thing. Of course this makes for a very powerful reducing agent. You can then add an aromatic compound like toluene, and out will come a cycloalkene. These smell really distinctive, and you can then do the usual reactions - the coolest of which is to add bromine to it.

5. Grignard reagents (R-MgX, where R is some hydrocarbon group and X is Cl, Br, or I) - Very much not general purpose bases, but these are so cool. These are superbases - bases stronger than hydroxides, which cannot exist in water and are destroyed by it. Performing Grignard reactions is something of a rite of passage for organic chem students, as they're moderately difficult but involve making fairly interesting new compounds. The main trick is keeping water out; it's hard to do this when you're a bag of mostly water, on a watery planet. It's possible but difficult to make Grignards and perform the reaction in an amateur environment; I did it a few times and was always able to create the reagent, but during the reaction itself I always got a terrible yield and a bunch of bizarre side products (including, one time, what I believe was butyric acid - the main contributor to vomit smell).

6. Lithium/sodium/potassium alkoxides (Li/Na/K-R) - Also superbases, and much easier to make than Grignards. For a cheap and impure alkoxide, just dissolve the hydroxide in a dry alcohol (methanol/ethanol/isopropanol). Want something purer and free of hydroxide? All you do is add lithium/sodium/potassium metal to the alcohol. They react in much the same way as water, only less vigorously. So they usually don't ignite or explode. Of course if they do they'll light the alcohol on fire as well, so be careful. Anyway, they have some uses - e.g. biodiesel is made from methoxide reacting with fatty acids. Obviously they're what you use if you want to do something alkaline in alcohol rather than water, because water is obnoxiously polar and doesn't combine well with nonpolar stuff.

7. Ammonia (NH3) - Obviously this stuff smells terrible, and I'm really not big on stinky/corrosive volatiles (like HCl on the acid side). So I don't use it as a base if I have any alternative. It definitely has a lot of interesting properties, though. It's the closest thing to water that isn't water - really simple, polar, inorganic, dominated by hydrogen bonds. If you have some dry ice and a high tolerance for risk, you can make anhydrous ammonia by adding an acid to an ammonium salt like ammonium sulfate, distilling through a column packed with a desiccant like calcium oxide, and allowing to drip into a flask submerged into a dry ice/acetone or alcohol bath. Anhydrous ammonia can be used to perform a Birch reduction, which is the ammonia version of the ethylenediamine reaction described above. Unfortunately the most popular Birch reduction is the reduction of pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine, so you really don't want anyone seeing you when you're doing one or they will get the wrong idea. Also there's the fact that ammonia boils at -33 C and has to be kept in a pressure vessel at all times above that temp, and if you're not careful (e.g. your vessel leaks, or you run out of dry ice during the Birch), the ammonia will flash-boil and then you have a giant cloud of toxic, corrosive, stinky gas.

[8. Organolithium reagents (R-Li) - These are like Grignards on the aforementioned meth. Exposed to oxygen, they instantly ignite. They're usually used as a solution in diethyl ether, itself infamous for being ultra-flammable and for causing fear and loathing. When lithium - metal or organolithium - ignites, it's virtually impossible to put out. It can burn in CO2 or even pure nitrogen. If you put sand on it, the sand can explode in a thermite reaction. A friend of mine is a chemical safety officer at UCLA, which is infamous for the time a graduate student caught fire while handling t-butyllithium and died slowly and painfully of the burns. Very much not recommended in an amateur setting.]

 

[onejayhawk]

You didn't mention HF etches glass, so it must be stored in plastic--and not just any plastic. Florine is nastiness in any form.

Perchloric acid combines with ammonia to produce rocket fuel. Gotta love it.

I once saw a demonstration where 1 gram of picric acid was wrapped tightly in aluminum foil (a vice was used). The package, about mm^3, was placed in an iron crucible and heated with a flame. After about two minutes--BOOM!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picric_acid

J

 

[Zkribbler]

I certainly don't have the means to heat metal sufficiently to pour it like that guy did to an anthill. Though poison spray seems a competent option, if unexciting.

Boiling are down an anthill works just fine..

 

[Bootstoots]

You didn't mention HF etches glass, so it must be stored in plastic--and not just any plastic. Florine is nastiness in any form.

Yeah, it has to be stored in Teflon or some similar fluorinated plastic.

One of the many problems with fluorine is that it is even more electronegative than oxygen, so that things like silica and even water can be further oxidized by it. So e.g. SiO2 + 4 HF --> SiF4 + 2 H2O. Under fluorine gas or chlorine trifluoride, practically everything including sand, asbestos, concrete, and water will burn spontaneously, ejecting oxygen and making fluorides.

I once saw a demonstration where 1 gram of picric acid was wrapped tightly in aluminum foil (a vice was used). The package, about mm^3, was placed in an iron crucible and heated with a flame. After about two minutes--BOOM!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picric_acid

J

That stuff is nasty, and I'm amazed at all the uses of it that didn't involve explosions. It seems people were pretty lackadaisical about it in the past, as well. My favorite line from the article is this:

Bomb disposal units are often called to dispose of picric acid if it has dried out. States started a push to remove dried picric acid containers from high school laboratories in the 1980s.

People just kind of left dry picric acid around in high school laboratories before the 1980s?!

 

[onejayhawk]

There are so many things that go boom when mishandled. In HS chemistry, the instructor made ammonia tetraiodide on his desk. She sprinkled it on blotter paper and hung it in front of a window to dry. At the end of the period, she dropped the paper in a metal pan. There was a loud clap and a cloud of green paper. All the ingredients were from a discount store.

Cinema film was nitro-cellulose (aka guncotton) for decades. You run the stuff in front of a high wattage lamp and are surprised when fires break out. On a side note, film flammability is one of the reasons that many silent movies are lost. Studios burned old film reels as a cheap special effect.

J

 

[Berzerker]

I was hoping to promote safe and non-violent means of wasp removal and the thread has become a gathering place for death merchants



https://www.newscientist.com/article/2174097-honeybees-gang-up-to-roast-invading-hornets-alive-at-a-terrible-cost/?campaign_id=RSS|NSNS-news

How about that method for killing hornets?

Eh, for people who dont want to click the link - bees literally swarm hornets to kill them with their body heat

 

[Sommerswerd]

I was hoping to promote safe and non-violent means

You should know better by now than to promote such on CFC.

 

[Kyriakos]

You should know better by now than to promote such on CFC.

Just read @Akka 's signature

 

[Bootstoots]

There are so many things that go boom when mishandled. In HS chemistry, the instructor made ammonia tetraiodide on his desk. She sprinkled it on blotter paper and hung it in front of a window to dry. At the end of the period, she dropped the paper in a metal pan. There was a loud clap and a cloud of green paper. All the ingredients were from a discount store.

See now that's actually cool and surprisingly non-dangerous. Nitrogen triiodide is so sensitive that you can't assemble much of it in one place or it will just blow up with a puff of iodine vapor. Same with silver fulminate, minus the iodine. There's nothing like explosions to get kids interested in chemistry, and I worry that people are so concerned with safety these days that they don't do anything interesting to actually get people interested in science.

But just kind of leaving dry picric acid around is a totally different matter, especially in quantities of like 100 g or more. That's a powerful bomb waiting to go off if someone accidentally bumps or drops the jar.

The easiest explosive to make, and one of the scariest for its sensitivity, is TATP (triacetone triperoxide), made by mixing acetone with H2O2. ISIS calls it "Mother of Satan" for its tendency to cause premature martyrdom. One of my biggest fears when messing with chemicals was that I'd end up combining the two in a reaction without thinking about it.

 

[Farm Boy]

I like this thread.

 

[onejayhawk]

I like this thread.

Things that go boom in the night.

J

 

[Sommerswerd]

For completeness' sake, I'll put up bases too. It's a very similar list. I'll put it in a spoiler too because I'm all about symmetry.

None of these are recommended for wasp removal. Or WASP removal for that matter. If you try that, more WASPs will come and arrest you. Although there won't be very many WASPs on the inside, so there is that.

Without further ado:

Spoiler Bootstoots' ranking of bases :

1. Sodium carbonate (aka washing soda, Na2CO3) - A very useful, very cheap and easy to obtain, not very dangerous base. It's the conjugate base of sodium bicarbonate aka baking soda, and it functions basically as a stronger version of bicarb. It's just strong enough to cause the usual base reactions like saponification (soap-making) of fat, without being too damaging to skin. I always carried a solution of this stuff with me when messing with acids, as the fizzing provides a perfect indication of when the acid has been neutralized. Downside is that it's not all that strong.

2. Trisodium phosphate (TSP, Na3PO4) - Much like sodium carbonate. Great for making buffers with phosphoric acid, and phosphates help fight rust as well. No fizzing, obviously; the phosphate stays in the solution, which can be a drawback because phosphates of other elements are often insoluble. Also weak; marginally stronger than sodium carbonate.

3. Sodium/potassium hydroxide (lye, Na/KOH) - The main workhorse strong base. Perfect for just about every reaction that calls for a strong base. Doesn't leave anything but alkali metal ions in the solution you're working with. Cheap and easy to obtain. The only drawbacks are related to its strength - it's much more dangerous than the first two. The solid or (especially) concentrated solutions can easily cause severe burns, which get worse than acid burns because they destroy proteins by hydrolysis and turn any fat in your tissue into soap. Choice of NaOH or KOH depends on the use, but for the most part they're interchangeable.

4. Ethylenediamine (NH2-CH2-CH2-NH2) - This isn't a general purpose base, and it's kind of toxic and smells like a mix of ammonia and rotting fish. But it's a very interesting compound in a couple of ways. The first is that it can be reacted with some organics and make stuff with interesting coordination behavior, like EDTA. But this pales in comparison to my favorite use for it, which is an analogue of the Birch reduction (see ammonia, #7) but stronger, done at room temperature, and thus far not discovered (or not found useful) by meth-heads, AFAIK. You take lithium metal and add it in. It dissolves and forms a deep blue solution with solvated electrons - free electrons buzzing around doing their thing. Of course this makes for a very powerful reducing agent. You can then add an aromatic compound like toluene, and out will come a cycloalkene. These smell really distinctive, and you can then do the usual reactions - the coolest of which is to add bromine to it.

5. Grignard reagents (R-MgX, where R is some hydrocarbon group and X is Cl, Br, or I) - Very much not general purpose bases, but these are so cool. These are superbases - bases stronger than hydroxides, which cannot exist in water and are destroyed by it. Performing Grignard reactions is something of a rite of passage for organic chem students, as they're moderately difficult but involve making fairly interesting new compounds. The main trick is keeping water out; it's hard to do this when you're a bag of mostly water, on a watery planet. It's possible but difficult to make Grignards and perform the reaction in an amateur environment; I did it a few times and was always able to create the reagent, but during the reaction itself I always got a terrible yield and a bunch of bizarre side products (including, one time, what I believe was butyric acid - the main contributor to vomit smell).

6. Lithium/sodium/potassium alkoxides (Li/Na/K-R) - Also superbases, and much easier to make than Grignards. For a cheap and impure alkoxide, just dissolve the hydroxide in a dry alcohol (methanol/ethanol/isopropanol). Want something purer and free of hydroxide? All you do is add lithium/sodium/potassium metal to the alcohol. They react in much the same way as water, only less vigorously. So they usually don't ignite or explode. Of course if they do they'll light the alcohol on fire as well, so be careful. Anyway, they have some uses - e.g. biodiesel is made from methoxide reacting with fatty acids. Obviously they're what you use if you want to do something alkaline in alcohol rather than water, because water is obnoxiously polar and doesn't combine well with nonpolar stuff.

7. Ammonia (NH3) - Obviously this stuff smells terrible, and I'm really not big on stinky/corrosive volatiles (like HCl on the acid side). So I don't use it as a base if I have any alternative. It definitely has a lot of interesting properties, though. It's the closest thing to water that isn't water - really simple, polar, inorganic, dominated by hydrogen bonds. If you have some dry ice and a high tolerance for risk, you can make anhydrous ammonia by adding an acid to an ammonium salt like ammonium sulfate, distilling through a column packed with a desiccant like calcium oxide, and allowing to drip into a flask submerged into a dry ice/acetone or alcohol bath. Anhydrous ammonia can be used to perform a Birch reduction, which is the ammonia version of the ethylenediamine reaction described above. Unfortunately the most popular Birch reduction is the reduction of pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine, so you really don't want anyone seeing you when you're doing one or they will get the wrong idea. Also there's the fact that ammonia boils at -33 C and has to be kept in a pressure vessel at all times above that temp, and if you're not careful (e.g. your vessel leaks, or you run out of dry ice during the Birch), the ammonia will flash-boil and then you have a giant cloud of toxic, corrosive, stinky gas.

[8. Organolithium reagents (R-Li) - These are like Grignards on the aforementioned meth. Exposed to oxygen, they instantly ignite. They're usually used as a solution in diethyl ether, itself infamous for being ultra-flammable and for causing fear and loathing. When lithium - metal or organolithium - ignites, it's virtually impossible to put out. It can burn in CO2 or even pure nitrogen. If you put sand on it, the sand can explode in a thermite reaction. A friend of mine is a chemical safety officer at UCLA, which is infamous for the time a graduate student caught fire while handling t-butyllithium and died slowly and painfully of the burns. Very much not recommended in an amateur setting.]

Why you lump together Sodium Hydroxide and Potassium Hydroxide? Can you indulge us (me) by explaining the difference between the two? Not the chemical difference mind you... which will woosh over my head like so many fighter jets buzzing the tower... but explain the practical differences?

Also... about "the inside"... that's a common misconception... WASPs are a majority, or at a minimum, a plurality on the inside which is mostly protestant and mostly white.

 

[Yeekim]

I didn't want to kill them

You are too saintly a man for this world.
Wasps don't belong among those creatures I allow myself to empathize with...

 

[Kyriakos]

Why you lump together Sodium Hydroxide and Potassium Hydroxide? Can you indulge us (me) by explaining the difference between the two? Not the chemical difference mind you... which will woosh over my head like so many fighter jets buzzing the tower... but explain the practical differences?

Also... about "the inside"... that's a common misconception... WASPs are a majority, or at a minimum, a plurality on the inside which is mostly protestant and mostly white.

Aren't those MWASMPs?

 

[Bootstoots]

Why you lump together Sodium Hydroxide and Potassium Hydroxide? Can you indulge us (me) by explaining the difference between the two? Not the chemical difference mind you... which will woosh over my head like so many fighter jets buzzing the tower... but explain the practical differences?

The chemical difference is really simple: Sodium and potassium are both extremely similar - they're alkali metals (the leftmost column) and are adjacent to each other:

Elements in the same column typically share similar traits. That's especially true of the alkali metals, which are so similar that it is almost like the same element just comes in different sizes.

So sodium and potassium are mostly interchangeable for each other in molecules where they're present. There are a few practical differences: if you're making soap, for instance, sodium hydroxide will make a harder soap suitable for bar soap, while potassium hydroxide will make a softer soap. KOH is more soluble in methanol than NaOH, which makes KOH slightly better for biodiesel production. But by and large they might as well be the same substance.

Also... about "the inside"... that's a common misconception... WASPs are a majority, or at a minimum, a plurality on the inside which is mostly protestant and mostly white.

The first one is behind a paywall, while the second seems to be down. But I'll take your word for it - it's not terribly surprising, even with minority overrepresentation, given that the population is mostly white and Protestant. (I'm ignoring the AS part)

 

[Sommerswerd]

Aren't those MWASMPs?

Nope you're thinking of MMOWASPSRPGs

There are a few practical differences: if you're making soap, for instance, sodium hydroxide will make a harder soap suitable for bar soap, while potassium hydroxide will make a softer soap. KOH is more soluble in methanol than NaOH, which makes KOH slightly better for biodiesel production. But by and large they might as well be the same substance.

Thanks Boots!

The first one is behind a paywall, while the second seems to be down.

Hmmm, I'm guessing maybe the ad-blocker on my laptop got around that somehow... that's funny. Oh well.

(I'm ignoring the AS part)

Yeah everybody does. As @Farm Boy regularly points out... (paraphrasing) "white" is a pretty general term... and as I always point out, so is "black"... so are "Hispanic" and "Asian" FTM.

 

[innonimatu]

People just kind of left dry picric acid around in high school laboratories before the 1980s?!

That takes me back... I remember a rather too big flask of yellow picric acid sitting in a shelf, with a warning, and it was no longer the 80s!

 

[miaasma]

when i was like 10 years old wasps built a nest on the outside of a window on the 2nd story of my house

literally on the window, so you could see inside with all the wasps crawling between the layers

you could also see them building it very close up

 

[Lexicus]

Nope you're thinking of MMOWASPSRPGs Thanks Boots! Hmmm, I'm guessing maybe the ad-blocker on my laptop got around that somehow... that's funny. Oh well. Yeah everybody does. As @Farm Boy regularly points out... (paraphrasing) "white" is a pretty general term... and as I always point out, so is "black"... so are "Hispanic" and "Asian" FTM.

That's partially because these terms are not really 'ethnicities' in the normal sense of this word, they're instead weird intentional creations of the slave system that characterized the colonies.