Jen's Column / Bees

Our bees are out in full force. I say "our bees," because I suspect they have a home under our siding. I notice them swarming the house just above our deck — but they're being coy about it. Like they don't want me to know. Just when it seems they're about to head in — they shoot a suspicious glance in my direction and fly away.

My kids are, as kids generally tend to be, afraid of bees. Oh, who am I kidding? We're all pretty much afraid of bees, aren't we? (As my friend Jen said about her husband, "Bill has climbed mountains, has climbed rocks, has jumped off very tall bridges without a rope. Yet he runs from bees.")

The old "they won't hurt you if you don't hurt them" holds no ground at my house. My boys have both been on the wrong end of a stinger and swear they didn't do anything to trigger it.

But that's not true.

My youngest was big into stomping on bugs when he was a toddler. He'd see an ant, a small black beetle, a leaf that resembled a moth, and he'd launch his pudgy little bare feet on the offensive. "Got 'em!" he'd say. Until the day he stomped on an unforgiving bee. I think it's safe to say he provoked that attack.

My oldest son didn't get his first sting until just a few years ago. He was pushing a stick into a hole at the top of our swing set — a perfectly natural way for a little boy to spend an entire afternoon — when a bee flew out and got him on the shoulder. Based on the screaming involved, you would've thought the bee had not only stung him, but then threw rubbing alcohol with a salt chaser in the wound.

I can sympathize. I got my first bee sting pulling on a pair of jeans — with embroidered ponies on the back pocket, no less — when I was in kindergarten. The bee, who had apparently been hiding in the pants leg, landed his tail firmly in my bottom. I haven't been able to wear pony jeans since.

My husband Jay has the best sting story. He was mowing the lawn around a large bush — a bush that we now know was camouflaging a giant wasp nest. Apparently the lawnmower freaked out the wasps. They came out en masse and enraged.

Jay ran into the house so fast his wallet flew out of his back pocket and his glasses hung off his face. You think I'm exaggerating. I'm not exaggerating.

The wasps got his face. His ankles. His arms. But he was still standing as we watched the inhabitants of the entire hive attack the lawnmower — circling it in a buzz we could hear from the other side of our kitchen window.

"I've got to go back and get my wallet," my husband said after a few minutes.

"Can’t you wait?" I asked. "I don't think they're going to run off with it." But apparently it was a matter of some urgency.

"OK, I’m going for it," he announced. I stood in the window and watched as the blur that was Jay turned the corner into the backyard, palmed his wallet, and was back in the kitchen before I could say, "Don't go!"

This second trip left him relatively unscathed. Still, the memory is indelibly imprinted on his brain. "It was a hot and sunny day," he'll say when we talk about it, his eyes going blank. "I was wearing my plaid shorts and a T-shirt…"

Still, his most impressive bee story, Jay assures me, happened when he was a kid.
"A bumblebee hit me in the eye once," he says proudly. "And my eye got as big as a softball."

I'm going to try very hard not to top that one. Ever.