Killer Bees

by 

Jaron Summers

A swarm of killer bees attacked a Californian who jumped into a swimming pool. When he surfaced, the enraged bees stung him to death.

Killer bees have been migrating from Mexico into Southern California for years. Apparently some Brazilian scientists were messing around in 1956 with South African bees, trying to figure out how to get better honey when their experiments got away.

Once again stupid scientists have screwed things up for mankind and the general public is getting stung. They should have checked with Mr. Adcock, he would have set them straight.

Mr. Adcock lived a block from our home in Coronation, in the center of the Alberta plains. I was 14 years old and decided to raise bees so I bought a few books and talked to Mr. Adcock, who was about 75.

Every spring Mr. Adcock would buy bundles of bees, each containing an Italian queen, and dump them into his hives. Then in the fall he would kill them and take their honey. There was about a six month season when the bees worked furiously to produce enough honey to make it through the winter that they knew was coming, even though they had just arrived from out of town.

A pound of bees with an Italian queen cost seven dollars. You had to buy supers (the hollow boxes you pile on top of each other to build the hive.) You also needed racks with sheets of wax in it. You drop these in the supers, and the bees extrude the wax and fill it with honey.

Oh, you also had to get the honey into jars. You would take out the racks, use a hot knife to cut off the ends of the wax cells and then the honey would run out. Mr. Adcock had a centrifuge --a gadget that spun the racks. Honey would splatter onto the inside of a barrel and run down the inside and you could drain it off.

In my best year I harvested a thousand pounds of honey and I sold it for 25 cent a pound. Not counting my time, the use of my father's car, Mr. Adcock's machinery, taking my dog to the vet after he nearly got stung to death, I almost broke even but I learned things:

1. Bee stings were good for you. Mr. Adcock had palsy that made him shake; he would get the bees to sting him and his shakes would stop.

2. The secret to great honey had nothing to do with bee types. It all depended on the kind of flowers and grasses that they gathered nectar from. The best place was Mrs. Selfors' farm. There were lots of wild flowers and acres of clover. Mrs. Selfors was my high school English teacher and she was great.

3. Never go to Mrs. Selfors place after dark.

Let me explain what happened about this time of year in 1959. I had just killed my bees with cyanide and I was taking a rack of honey to Mrs. Selfors'. She liked it in the comb.

I was feeling badly that I had murdered all my bees and stolen their honey and I worried that some of them might be alive, following me in the dusk. (Although killer bees did not exist then, I imagined them anyway.) As I was walking past some shrubs, almost to Mrs. Selfors' door, a shaking thing busted out of the bushes and screamed at me. It was not a giant bee. It was a naked crazy man and he went for my throat. Luckily for me he was wearing a dog collar on his neck that was attached to a heavy chain.

When the shaking wild man was one inch from me, the heavy chain jerked him back on his ass. Mrs. Selfors ran outside and, using a broom, beat him back into the bushes.

She told me not to discuss what had happened with the other kids at school. I agreed, even though I longed to tell my friends about the crazy shaking man chained under the bushes in our English teacher's yard.

I mentioned it to Mr. Adcock and said I thought maybe bee stings would calm down the wild man. He asked me if I wanted to be a bee keeper or a writer.

I said a writer.

He said: "Keep your mouth shut, stay on the good side of your English teacher, and forget about wild men."

For many years I was able to follow this advice.

But then I came to Hollywood to write screenplays. Here there are wild men (and wild women) everywhere. They are called producers and even when they are asleep they are much more dangerous than the guy who lived in Mrs. Selfors’ bushes.

Tragically, almost none of the producers here wear collars with chains while they are at work. So there is not much to restrain them. Oh, well.