BUZZZ

With the Canadian leg of my summer road trip behind me, Michigan is a great place to land. Along the way I am always asked about my home, where I live or where I come from. I hate it when they do that; it’s such a Human, tribal, who’s your mama thing to do. When I was 19 they shaved my head and forgot I had two names; I was just Stevens. They assigned me first to one place, transferred to another, and another, and another. After three years I surprised them all. I took my shaved head and went home. They thought I would reenlist, that living in the outside world would be more than I could manage after all, the Army takes good care of its own. I thanked them and closed the door behind me. But when I got home it wasn’t home any more, everything looked familiar but I didn’t fit. Eventually I came to believe that home was a place in time, as much about being 16 as about coordinates and zip codes. I wasn’t home, just reassigned to a place I’d been before. 

A lifetime later, reassignment has been my way of life, disarming at first but it grows on you. I pitch my tent for a while and strike it as need be. I don’t romanticize human superiority or wallow in civilized hubris but I do ask questions that nobody wants to think about. That bothers folks with a tribal mind set. I love West Michigan. If I have to be from somewhere, and the government requires a legal address where they can deliver mail; it would be near Grand Rapids, Michigan and it is.  I have a house in Missouri and I get mail there too but the Feds only recognize one permanent address. I chose Michigan. Back from Canada, I pulled in our Michigan drive. Duane, my brother by another mother and his son Ben were in their sting proof suits, working with their bees. I kept a safe distance. 

Back Story: Duane started keeping bees a few years back; pollinators for his blueberries. Bees are absolutely incredible. When a bee keeper wants to split one hive into two, one of the new hives keeps the old queen and the other is without a queen. In the bee-keeper culture, propagating and selling new, virgin queens is serious business. So when Duane splits a hive and needs a new queen, he orders one that is shipped UPS, over night, in a little bug-size cage. The new queen has her own pheromones, unique to her. The bees in the queenless hive become aggressive and angry in the absence of a queen but the new one is strange and they will kill her. So the bee keeper leaves the new queen inside her little cage with some food, opens the hive and puts her inside. The worker bees try to get at her but they can’t. In two or three days, they get acclimated to the new queen’s pheromones and they settle down. Then the bee keeper goes back in, frees the new queen and closes  the hive. Once accepted by her new hive, the new queen goes on a mating flight with several hundred drones, returns to the hive and starts laying eggs. The new bee community is happy again. 

Duane and Ben were installing a new queen, in her cage, into a split hive of really aggressive, angry bees. I gave way, maybe 30 yards. When Duane pulled the top off the hive it looked like an erupting volcano. Thousands of bees swarmed up and out, attacking the two men who had to wait for them to disburse, so they could see inside the hive. In the meantime, bees were buzzing around the hive in an expanding swarm, looking for something to attack. They had been several days without a queen and “pissed off” would be an understatement. I heard a buzz that was too close and I beat a hasty retreat. I was wearing a floppy brim hat and sun glasses. When I felt a thump on my back I knew to start running. Two, three thumps on my hat and one got under the brim, hit me on the lens of my glasses. I swear I head a “Pow” sound and felt excruciating pain on the mastoid bone, just behind my ear. Panic is the word. The only thing in my mind was to escape this little, hand full of insects: no plan, no logic, no anger, just get separation. How does that little buzz bomb, whose life span under the best conditions is only a few weeks, how does it totally reduce the world’s most superior creature to a pitiful prey? I was almost to the barn, on the gravel drive, waving my arms, swatting at things I couldn’t see. They gave up or lost interest and it was over. 

          Duane and Ben were still working at the open hive. I could hear their angry buzz. My own adrenalin wore off and the pain surged again. It really hurt. I knew the stinger would be ripped out of the bee and stuck in me. Muscles stay with the stinger so it continues to inject bee venom into the victim. To reach up and try to find it, it would get squeezed or bumped, almost guaranteeing that all of the bee venom would be injected. But it hurts so bad you think it can’t hurt worse so you try to find it and pull it out. You discover you were wrong, it can hurt worse. The pain is full consuming, like being stung all over again. My whole world, my complete existence was fixed on a single bee sting.  I tried to collect myself and I thought, ‘this must be akin to child birth.’ Five minutes later the pain was still intense but I was functioning again. I’m not allergic to bee sting but could’t help agonize; what if the other four or five bees had scored direct hits? Duane and Ben get stung all the time but have developed immunity or resistance. He promised, in 48 hours the bees in that hive would be happy, peaceful as butterflies. I took him at his word; I really do believe him. When he went out to check on them the next day, I stayed in the house.