I was riding in the back of a pickup one time, and opened my mouth to laugh, and took a june bug in the back of my throat at 60 miles an hour.
That hurt like hell.
I always had enough sense to keep my mouth mostly shut (well, grinning with teeth displayed doesn't count as open, quite) while riding motorcycles. I got one wasp up the sleeve of my leathers going down the road between NewTown and Max, doing about 60. Needless to say, the critter took great umbrage at having been scooped out of the air and propelled up the sleeve of my leathers toward my armpit, and on seven different occasions before I could shut down the bike and pull over and shuck my leathers off, it told me so in no uncertain terms. Ouch. Wasps are nasty. A honey bee would have only got me once.
The other insect antics of note included hitting a swarm of mosquitoes coming down into the Missouri River bottoms so dense they plugged my nostrils and splattered all over my goggles so thick I had to stop and blow the critters out and wipe the goo and wings off the lenses. I don't want to think what that would have been like for my eyes without those goggles, and I could barely see through the mess on the lenses to get pulled over.
On my way down US 85 to Sturgis one year I saw this huge grasshopper on the road, a good 3-3 1/2 inches long and sure as heck, as my front tire passed, it launched, splattering all over my rag, putting a double gouge in one of the buttons I had on it, and covering most of the front of me with grasshopper goo. It took riding through three serious rainstorms to get most of that off...
But I left the June Bugs for the ducks...
Good times.
