Once a year, I need to weed the area around my entryway. Most of it is “fern covered” but the cracks in between the slate paving stones have to be cleaned out once.
And for some reason, there’s an area under a mugo pine where the ferns won’t grow, so that will get weedy too. I haven’t figured out a good ground cover for under there yet.
So I start with an area that looks like this.
And finish with this.
This year there was a minor complication. I was weeding out my slate cracks….
Can you tell what happened? Perhaps with this closer photo.
I wound up “weeding” up an ant colony. I had to go away for a bit to let them resettle themselves.
But it could have been worse, of course. It could have been hornets!
Gardendaze 
I never pulled up hornets, but I did cut into a hive with a post hole digger.
Ugh! That must have been nasty! There’s a hornet’s nest–& as these things go, I guess we’re blessed in location–in between the roots of my yellow magnolia. That area gets really weedy too but if I never weed under there, it’s no tragedy. It’s just an island bed with that tree (& lots of chipmunk runs around and near it, which is where the hornets nest every year).
Karla