It's been 10 years since the last invasion, but the memory is still strong. In the summer of '96, they were everywhere, building nests in our lawn, attacking my legs every time I had to cut the grass.

Nothing worked to get rid of them. I tried sprays, I tried flooding their nests with the hose. Whenever I'd fill in one of their holes, two more would sprout, until my yard became a deadly Swiss cheese, each little hollow spewing more attackers. I still call it the "Summer of the Yellow Jackets."

Late in the '96 skirmish, I resorted to crude methods to fight the enemy. Each night after dinner, I'd run from entrance to entrance, pouring gasoline down their holes and dropping in matches. It didn't do much to the yellow jackets, who were back the next morning with a vengeance, but it gave me a sense of satisfaction every time I heard the "wooosh" of an underground explosion.

Most evenings, you could find me squatting out in the yard with a wild grin on my face, a gas can in one hand and a pack of matches in the other, smoke and flames rising from craters across our lawn like a miniature Gettysburg.

Eventually, the smoke cleared, the summer of '96 ended and so did my yellow jacket worries. We've had a 10-year quiet on the home front. They've stayed mostly out of my territory. To be on the safe side, I've had my sons, who can run faster than I can, cut the grass.

But this summer I started to notice the little invaders again, buzzing around every time we ate outside, swarming around the kids as they played ball. It took a few minutes of pacing around our front yard before I found the mole hole they'd commandeered and turned into their command and control center. Judging from the number of takeoffs and landings, there were thousands of the little pests humming around just under my sod. The battle was on.

I know I'll hear from people out there who feel that yellow jackets are noble creatures with just as much right to exist as any other creature, and that I should just live and let live.

Those people only feel that way because they're crazy. Yellow jackets look like honey bees, but they're not. They're wasps. And while bees are on this earth to do some pretty cool things, like pollinate flowers, make honey and form buzzing beards for folks who want to be in Ripley's Believe it or Not, wasps are on this earth to do just one thing: sting you and me.

I drove to my local home megastore to find out whether anything new had been invented to fight these pests. I was 10 years older now and no longer had the stomach for a long, drawn-out campaign. The megastore sold me a yellow jacket trap, a plastic container with little holes in the bottom and a collection chamber in the top, with a dose of yellow jacket attractant inside, scientifically designed to draw in male yellow jackets from far away.

The trap worked but only so far. Every night I'd empty out 10 to 12 yellow jackets on the driveway, crushing them with my shoe before they could fly away. But it wasn't fast enough. While I was topside, squishing yellow jackets a dozen at a time, I was pretty sure they were down below, churning out more yellow jackets as fast as they could. I had to find a quicker way to wipe out the enemy.

A friend sent me an e-mail saying the best way to eliminate the enemy was good old gasoline. The trick, he wrote, was to resist the urge to light it, like most people. It was the fumes, not the flames, that did the trick. Only an idiot, he said, would set fire to his own lawn.

So one night last week at dusk, I edged closer to the hole, my trusty gas can and a funnel in hand, on a commando mission. I quickly slipped the funnel into the hole, upended the can and ran like crazy.

The next morning, the battle was clearly over. By the dawn's early light, I could see that yellow jacket HQ had been wiped out, noxious fumes rising through the mist.

I know it's only a temporary victory, of course. But next spring, you'll find me on my front stoop, red can in hand, surveying the horizon for invaders. You're welcome to stop by.

But if you do, for God's sake, don't light a cigarette.