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.
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