I'm baaaack. Didja miss me?
Well, this has been the move from Hell, truly. And while we are far from done, I think it has finally upgraded to Purgatory. We can at least see the floors and walls in most places, and have made sufficient progress in the house that I can enjoy spending part of the time on outside projects, which are considerably more fun!
So we have these large fields, ours and neighboring ones, that are all surrounded by firelanes, cleared little "roadways" comprising the perimeters of all the fields. Good for getting equipment where it needs to go, and given the name I am assuming there is some anticipation that in case of fire they can get firetrucks up in there or something. Personally, I view them as riding trails and access to blackberries.
Blackberries are an invasive nuisance. If you have ever seen Little Shop of Horrors, think Audrey. They grow gargantuan amounts overnight in the dark and trap the unwary. Painfully. I would consider them a scourge worthy of complete eradication as a species but for one thing - I actually love blackberries. I love eating them. I love picking them. I love making fresh blackberry pancakes on a lovely morning after hiking out to pick them. I love washing them and dusting them with sugar and barely freezing them, so they are like little glazed berry-flavored crunchies. There is simply nothing bad about blackberries as a consumable. So I put up with the thorns.
And here is the other thing about walking out on a summer morning to pick blackberries - there are a lot of bees. Now those of you who have read my earlier blogs will understand I am not overly fond of bees. I especially do not like bees in large quantities. There is a story about that, which I will share eventually. But bees in small numbers are amazingly, well, harmonious. It's like we are on the same team. The whole Circle of Life thing - they are out there buzzing productively around pollinating flowers so that the flowers can make berries and I am out there picking berries and feeding them to not just myself but my animals, and the seeds make their way (use your imagination, people) back to the soil and make more blackberries, and that's how the world goes round.
So I make my way up the firelanes, along which are approximately 37.4 billion blackberries, and I just pick a few here and a few more there, and have the luxury of only taking the very fattest ones because there are so many I cannot possibly EVER pick them all. EVER. And the bees just zoom around and do their thing. And we have established detente. (Look it up)
For me this is like some sort of bee epiphany. Peaceful coexistence with BEES, who knew.
So here are my two best bee stories. The first is the stuff of horror movies, the second is the stuff of comedy.
Long ago and far away (literally, it was in South Louisiana) I was drifting in and out of consciousness on a rare morning of sleeping in. I had not been in this apartment long, and it was in fact the place I first learned about picking blackberries. At the time, the complex was sort of in the middle of farmland at the end of a road, with a dirt drive behind the property rimmed with blackberries. I had honestly never had them before, I don't know whether they just don't grow wild in Ohio or I was insufficiently exposed to nature to know about them. Anyway, it was a nice new apartment complex on the outskirts of Lafayette, Louisiana, where there are only two seasons - Hot and Hellishly Hot. This morning was just Hot, and the drone of the AC was pleasantly feeding my drowsiness. Somewhere between dead asleep and trying to get back to dead asleep, I became gradually aware that the drone of the AC was sort of buzzy. I pried one eye open and noticed a bee in the room, hovering around the air vent. (Bad things happen in air vents, if you don't believe me you have never seen a submarine movie or Mission Impossible). I figured even I could ignore one bee so long as he ignored me, so I drifted off again. When I next opened my eyes, because the bee seemed to be getting louder, there were two, then three bees. They were emanating from the air vent. I told you!!! Bad things!! Horror movie bad!!
At this point I jumped up, ran down the hall to the kitchen area to see if there was a door or window open or something. THere was not, and as I made my way back down the hall, past the second bedroom, I heard it. It was like a great vibratory angry BZZZZZZZZZZZZ. The bedroom door was shut. Hmmmmm - do I open it? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME???? I am one of those people who yells at the actors onscreen not to go in the basement. Yet - I opened the door. And there was - nothing there. Except the noise. Again, it seemed to be issuing forth from behind a closed door, in this case the closet. Again like a complete idiot I slid the door open. Again, nothing there. But the noise was horrendous. You have no idea what several thousand very very angry bees sound like when your head is in a closet and they are on the other side of the wall. Yup, IN THE WALL.
I got my stethoscope (I must have been on drugs that day, seriously) and put it to the wall and it was deafening. As with many circumstances in medicine, there can be a huge gulf between diagnosing the problem and knowing what in the sam hill you intend to do about it. I called the
apartment manager, I figured it was most decidedly more in her job description than mine, and later that day The Bee Man arrived, worked his magic, and they all left in a big swarm out some defect in the apartment wall that YES INDEEDY I made sure they patched immediately. I heard that noise for a looooooong time. I was terrified of waking up to find a whole hive's worth of bees streaming out of the air vent over my bed.
So, some years later, when I was a newlywed with a husband raised in the country and with certain odd proclivities with respect to creatures of one kind and another (NOOOO not like that), and who has more than a little tendency to play tricks on people, mostly me, I was understandably a bit alarmed and suspicious when he proceeds to tell me one lovely Saturday morning that there are certain white-faced bumblebees who do not have stingers. And that he used to catch them, tie a string around their midsections, and then fly them around in little circles on their "leash." Yeah, right. PROVE IT.
SO he did. We went out in our little side yard, this was during our time on the 17 acre farm, and found himself a white-faced bumblebee, and proceeded to smack it down. Literally, smacked it right out of the sky, in mid-buzz. And then proceeded to tie a piece of sewing thread around its middle and wait for it to come to. When it regained consciousness, or what passes for it among bees, it tried to fly off, only to find itself tethered. Round and round it flew, tied to his finger. I got a very clear picture why his mom called it quits after having him and his twin brother.
So somewhere between the horrific buzzing horde in the closet wall, and the poor ridiculous white faced bumblebee on a string, I have made peace with the bees in my world. As long as they don't organize and come after me, then all bets are off.