Bee movie

I like most things about Florida, but a lot of them make me itch.

The dogs get poison ivy sap on their claws and inoculate me. 

OFF!® isn’t effective against mosquitoes like small biplanes that leave bites the size of dome lights. 

Fire ants don’t make their presence nearly obvious enough, given how keen they are on guarding their territory.  They bite you before you even know they’re there.  Until now, I’d experienced no itchier bite than that of the black fly—another species that gets you before you know you’re being gotten.  Fire ants are worse.

One day the dachshunds were poking inquisitively at a honeybee.  “No, no, girls!  He bite you,” I chirped, and pulled them out of harm’s way. 

That bee was the least of my worries.

When I next took them out, didn’t the stubborn little tykes go to the self-same spot, this time to nose at a couple of honeybees crawling about.  Again I hauled them back, while brushing something off my neck that stung me at once and began itching like a bastard.

My suspicions aroused, I scoured the grass, the mailbox, the staghorn fern on the tree.  I saw only a few bees, of which I steered clear, I can tell you.  I have a healthy respect for them ever since my old golden retriever stumbled into a ground nest. Afterwards, his face was frozen in a permanent paralyzed sneer. And Bill is allergic.

So you can imagine my horror when I turned around and saw an iPad-shaped clot of bees quietly buzzing on the side of Bill’s rusty pickup truck.  I mused for a moment that this might prove a good excuse to get rid of the truck.  A better idea was to call Hughes Exterminators, who are supposed to keep our property free of things like bees.  My voice shook as I explained to the girl on the phone that we now had a bee problem.  “Hmm,” she said, which I didn’t find nearly sympathetic enough. “I’ll see if Ray can come by.”

When it was cooler and starting to get dark, he appeared.  The intrepid Ray didn’t even have a beekeeper suit on.  I stood back and pointed, trembling, at the bee clot, which hadn’t budged.   He explained that the bees were now dormant and proved his point by swatting the lot of them onto the ground with his bare hand and stomping on them. 

He added that, when colonies get too large, the queen kicks out a bunch of them, who then buzz off seeking a new place to live.  These bees hadn’t settled in yet.  He indicated an even larger mass of them huddled in the streetlight for warmth. 

“They might decide to leave on their own. But I can’t do a thing about them unless they form a cone,” he said.  Though free of charge, this wasn’t exactly helpful news.  

The next morning, I peered up at the streetlight.  They had gone off on their own!  I took the dogs for a carefree walk.  La-dee-dah.  The pups paused to express interest in something on the lawn.  Of course they did.  It was a squirming mound of honeybees.   

Bill and I agonized about what to do, consulting locals and googling bees.  Did we really care enough about the endangered honeybee population to seek out a beekeeper who might take them in?  Should we blast them with an insecticide gun that can shoot 20-foot streams, then run like hell when this makes them mad?  Where would we run to, exactly? Surely they would be hot on our trail, shaped into a single-minded, deadly drone like in a cartoon.  Bill suggested taking a large paving stone and dropping it onto them, trapping them to die of suffocation. I feared bees were clever enough to hold their breath, tunnel underneath, and escape.   

There are, believe it or not, “Beekeepers” listed in the Yellow Pages.  An Amish-sounding gentleman offered “Live Bee Removal, Don’t Get Stung Twice, We Don’t Leave a Mess!”  I was all for such live removal, but he was apparently out removing bees somewhere, or couldn’t pick up a phone because the Amish don’t have them.  But Earl Russell, of Russell Bee & Hornet Removal Service, “FL State Certified in Removal of African Killer Bees,” could.  Earl explained that, though he was a beekeeper, he didn’t take in wild bees, lest they bring diseases into his healthy domestic hives. 

Earl is a certified killer. For $100 it took him 30 seconds to do the deed, spraying the sleeping colony with stuff that he likened to napalm.  It left behind a blackened, twitching mass of bodies, over which Earl proffered a complimentary jar of his own honey. 

The exchange had a kind of karmic balance to it.