For I Am Fickle and Allow My Loyalties to Fall Where They May

I am currently looking forward to an entire evening of Canadians acting out Canadians acting out Shakespeare. “Slings and Arrows,” a mind blowing 3 season series, has recently captured my attention (thanks to a dear friend’s insistence that I watch it).

Before that was (a little ashamedly) “Invader Zim.” Before that was “Pushing Daisies.”

I like television series. Not all—most of them suck, actually—but some shows are simply brilliant, and I enjoy being able to follow the evolution of a character and a storyline over an extended period. It’s like a relationship verses a fling. Television verses movies. (Of course the movie-fling is not to be underrated.)

These dalliances I have with shows end up affecting whole areas of my life. I don’t know how obsessed I would be with Kansas had “Supernatural” not made me take note of it. Or how appreciative of the Hello Schroddy shirt I would be were it not for “Big Bang Theory.” And it’s not that I only like them for the shows. It’s a quality enjoyment I take on their own behalves, but the shows helped me to discover them.



So where did I go wrong with “Pushing Daisies”?

Oh sure, there’s pie, but I liked baking before that.
Nope. It was lonely tourist Charlotte Charles’ affinity for bee-keeping which has caused me trouble lately.

The farm where I work keeps bees. I both fear these bees and am fascinated by them. I adore them for the honey they have brought into my life, but I like to keep my distance, allowing volunteers to weed closest to their hives. (Mwahaha.) But I like to face my fears (if you don’t believe me, keep Vesuvius and Eyjafjallajokull in mind), and was undoubtedly intrigued by the hilariously and charmingly off-kilter quality of “Pushing Daisies’” beekeeping.

So when someone thought the hives smelled sour—a possible symptom of foulbrood—I quasi-eagerly volunteered to help check the hives.

Three of us suited up. Full body jumpsuits with mesh-helmets that made me feel like I was back in fencing and arm-length gloves that, had they been even mildly elegant, would have made me feel like Cinderella…in a jumpsuit…. Unfortunately, we had somehow misplaced a glove for one of the suits, and so my unlucky supervisor opted to wear a ski glove instead. It pinched shut around her wrist, but it wasn’t as satisfying or reassuring a seal as our long gloves were.

We went to the hives, two people to check the comb for signs of foulbrood and one person to smoke the bees.

To what?

Exactly what I said.

Apparently, when bees’ hives fill with smoke, they bunker down to wait it out, rather than swarm either to flee or attack. This, you can imagine, is a positive thing when diving into four hives, each filled with probably several thousand bees. I mean, we’re uninvited guests, and whether or not we mean well, we’re not welcome in their hives!

So I puffed smoke as we checked one super after another for yellow larvae instead of pearly white, or for disorganized laying patterns or gooey results in a matchstick test (I’ll spare you the details).

It was going really well, too, for about the first hive and a half.

But then the fire started to go out of my smoker. We stopped and relit it. Went out again. Stopped again. Lit again, and it took. We continued on. At some point, a bee got into our supervisor’s helmet and stuck in her hair.

Sting one for supervisor.

We continued and had trouble with the smoker. Again. Then, another bee in her helmet.

Sting two for supervisor.

As we’re dealing with sting two, the other farm team member has a bee crawl down his neck.

Sting one for team member.

We treat these stings, and another bee attacks my team member.

Sting two for team member.

We return to finish checking the hives. I think we made it through the third and part of the fourth before the smoker started going out. And then we made a bad decision.

It had already taken almost three hours to check the hives, and the continual problem with the smoker was significantly slowing us down. So we decided to work without it. We only had two supers left to check, anyway.

You can imagine, the bees were none too happy at this point.

Bee number three manages to weasel its way into my supervisor’s helmet.

Sting three for supervisor.

And then she looks down at her ski glove. And then she starts whimpering.

I honestly would have preferred screaming; something maybe watching too many horror movies has accustomed me to. But the utter fear expressed in the sound of her whimpers was horrendous. Thirty or forty bees were attempting to enter her glove, swarming her arm and inching their way toward her flesh. We had no good way to remove them. Or kill them. Or get the bee out of her helmet. And she was hurt and scared and it was killing us that we couldn’t help her as she abandoned the hives, whimpering all the while.

We fled the bee hives for the parking lot and spent the next twenty minutes swatting bees, spraying hoses, and ducking into port a potties.

Stings three and four for my team member. Stings four and five for our supervisor.

We re-donned our gear, closed up the hives, closed the farm early and ran away to the office for the rest of the day.

Somehow I managed to escape un-stung (thanks in part to my wonderful team member’s unceasing bravery in coming back despite his own stings to swat bees away from me and even crush an attacking bee against my collar).

Un-stung, yet fear reinforced. I’ll probably suit back up and do it again if we harvest honey while I’m still here, or in order to help feed the bees, but I’m no longer eagerly volunteering. “Supernatural” may have been right about Kansas, but I’m fairly certain that “Pushing Daisies” failed me when it came to beekeeping. Probably why the majority of the show was about pie-baking. Oh, and murder….

And so yesterday evening, I thought my dalliance in apiculture was over. I had that thought in my mind as I awoke this morning, and as I did paperwork throughout the day, and on the bike ride home.

But then I took off my shoe.

And there was a bee. Crushed against the big toe of my left sock. Stinger at the ready, yet somehow not in my foot.

I’m beginning to suspect that I shall be haunted by bees forevermore, my mini-saga with beekeeping slightly more epic than I would have expected. There’s a stinger with my name on it out there somewhere, but against all odds, it hasn’t found me yet.