gently, and toss it out the nearest window....
Wasps and bees in particular, they don't want to waste their venom (a highly-prized resource, not to be tossed about wantonly, it is to paralyze prey for storage with an egg laid on the stunned creature, baby feeds on them - eats them alive).
Bees in particular are good friends and neighbours, and no, I don't get stung, or spider-bitten, not even once in all these years. I'm too big (as small as I am) to be considered a fitting thing to expend venom upon.
Makes my wife nuts to see me pick a wasp up and take her to the window or door, but it works for me. Saves on chemical sprays, too. No odours, no toxic residue, no child-safe storage space required. And it's cheaper.
If you ever do manage to get the fear out of the interaction, you'll be in a lot more control, which translates into more gentle handling (no adrenaline rush to make your hands shake for instance) which further lowers the chance of stings and bites.
I am not saying you are wrong or belittling your apparent and obviously large fears, by the way. More like you than me in the human population, for certain, and if the majority is correct, well, then you're more 'right' than I am.
And that and two bucks will get you a coffee at the corner store.
Yes, widows and recluses, sorry, they get as close to instant euthanasia as I can provide. I completely agree, there is no reason not to make a necessary death any more painful or lingering than possible. Overkill, even, as quick as it can get. Too much power in too small a package in those creatures. Too dangerous to the small people who hang around this place.
If it were just me I'd probably leave them, they're not called "recluse" for nothing, and the widows stay in the dark and quiet as much as they possibly can. But with the grandbaby now living here, and the toddlers and little kids who are around this old house anon, they can't be trusted to avoid the dangers, so I do the same as you two.
Splut, get it over with fast.
I do hope you manage some day to relieve your fears, which you have already said are excessive and irrational, for the sake of lowering your stresses, and also for seeing the beauty in these creatures. If you're too afraid of them you won't ever see the shiny chitin of a wasp, all polished up like patent leather complete with all those racing stripes and swooshes; or the big saddle-bags of pollen on a friendly worker bee who has been harvesting nectar and pollen from the local plants; that beautiful furry tarantula with the striking markings, the fun you can have training them to enjoy being brushed with an old toothbrush.
We weren't allowed animals in the barracks, and in Texa$$ that meant that the mice were all over the place. No cats. So we started hunting up tarantulas from the fields around the base, and bringing them into our dormitories. You would be sitting in the dayroom, killing time until going on duty, and ZOT! Right in front of you a big tarantula would POUNCE! One bite, the mouse would go into convulsions and die within half a minute.
The spider would drag it under the couch or into a corner, and sit there on it, in a feeding torpor. Once they've had a mouse, they're not good for any more hunting for days, couple of weeks or more.
So one of the daily jobs was to scoop them (and their half-digested prey) onto a piece of paste-board and take the whole thing outside to a quiet spot under one of the porches, and gently put them down in a secluded spot to enjoy their dinner.
One jumbo-economy sized orange and black tarantula after a while got so used to being used for rodent control that it was as tame as most cats. It would go toward footsteps after having been taken outside after a kill, and climb onto your hand to be taken inside. The thing was as big across the leg span as a small plate, and quite beautiful in a spidery sort of way. Very striking colours and markings, and quite adapted to humans.
We would of course occasionally miss some of the kills, hidden under something or in a very secluded spot in the barracks, and when cleaning you would run across a desiccated bag of bones and fur which was all that was left of a mouse... Rather gruesome, if you're a mouse. But spiders don't harbour fleas, nor any of the nifty diseases you can get from mouse feces, mouse bites (or from their fleas). And they don't chew things up and pee all over them, leave their little poop pellets everywhere, destroy books, clothing, food and food containers, and so on.
I'll take an 8-inch diameter leg-spread tarantula over a nest of "cute" little mice any day.
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