Lethal Honey

Lethal Honey

Fierce and Fiercer

Apiphobia is the fear of bees.

I think I must have been six years old when my mom allowed me to watch Jurassic Park. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a deep passion for the colossal reptiles. It’s an awed respect combined with a terror of the now extinct creatures. Looking back it seems slightly irresponsible of my parents to indulge such a young child by allowing him to view graphic violence of Jurassic Park’s magnitude, but after relentless begging, it must have seemed to Mom that my thirst for dinosaurs would not be quenched any other way. My constant “Please Momma, I want to see the T-Rex,” slowly chinked at the parental armor, until I finally got to see carnivorous monsters shred human beings to pieces.

            Dinosaurs were just the beginning of my quest to indulge my destructive nature. As I grew up, I devoured the Animal Planet network on TV. At any time of the day, you could watch Steve Irwin (Crikey, God rest his soul) as he wrestled an alligator, or get a slow-motion view of a lioness making a kill on the African Savannah, not to mention a live battle of a giant squid taking to task a Sperm Whale, scarring it’s thick skin with lethal tentacles. There was even a show that reanimated ferocious animals and pitted them one-on-one in a computer simulation.

            But I think that the show that I remember watching the most was The World’s Deadliest, a show that had a top ten countdown of the most dangerous creatures that walk the planet earth. Each show was a variation; some shows highlighted the top ten deadliest snakes, others the deadliest locations on earth. I would watch these shows and become mesmerized by the lethal power that creatures alive today possessed.

            In retrospect, it is strange to contemplate my fascination with the deadly creatures of the planet. In my younger years, I would have terrible nightmares. Tossing and turning at night, and often sneaking into Mom and Dad’s room, I would lie awake tortured at the thought of flesh-eating beetles crawling under my sheets and devouring me, or a pack of rabid dogs carrying my helpless body away as I clawed at the floor trying to avoid my gruesome fate. And yet I returned to these shows and these creatures time and again. I simply couldn’t help myself. I am not completely surprised, for it is the things that we fear the most that we give all of our attention to.

            Of all the deadly creatures that I saw on TV or read about in books, one insect stood above them all. It is a peculiar animal, banded in a striped pattern, hardly bigger than the tip of a human thumb. It is a creature that still gives me chills to this day, its voice enough to send me running. My greatest foe, in its minute stature, its innocent work, and its glorious liquid…it is a horrifying fiend.

Enter the Woods

When a bee stings, it commits suicide.

            Growing up in Abilene, Texas, I learned long ago to be creative. In the titanic expanses underneath the fiery West Texas sun, rendering myself no bigger than one of Gulliver’s Lilliputians, I had to retain a sense of creativity in order to stay entertained.  I was a master of this craft, capable of molding the most mundane objects into venerable artifacts of untold legends. I could construct a pile of bricks into a notorious bandit hideout. Any hard object longer than my arm was Thor’s Hammer or the blade that cut the ring. The books that I read as a kid fueled my ambitious mind with adventures, noble missions, and quests ending in a most inopportune death.

            Across the street from my house, a small mesquite woods grew, housing patches of cactus, secret pathways, and critters of all shapes and sizes. The mesquite trees became my first mystical land, my first Mirkwood Forest. I whiled away countless hours among the stickers and cactus spines in sweat-drenched t-shirts and cargo shorts. Sometimes I would take my closest friends under those sacred branches, and together we would form alliances to reenact the fantastic games of my mind. Mainly, though, I entered the wood on my own, with some kind of homemade weapon, and proceeded to slay monsters (cactus), and scale castle walls (boulders). I found a solitude in the confinements of trees—an inner peace, a privacy that is so hard to come by in an urbanized city. This is the place that I fell in love with camping.

            Eventually, as tragic as it may sound, it is socially unacceptable to lead an army of Scots against the British at 3:00 PM on a Thursday afternoon. So I grew up and went to high school, and for a few years, I lost my sanctuary. I no longer ventured into the unknown dangers of the mesquite forest. My forest was out there still but in a new shape and form. The summer after my sixteenth birthday a new gateway to my sanctuary opened up wide in front of me.

            As I mentioned earlier, growing up in Abilene requires a certain level of creativity. Sure, it’s not like the po-dunk towns, and you can at least see the name on a map from a distance, but Abilene is an eyesore of a city, both in terms of nature and industry. In college, my out of town friends would ask me what I loved to do for fun in this city, and I would always say that I loved to go camp. After I turned sixteen, I had the opportunities to drive down to the State Park or land that my friends owned, and we would camp. I had camped a few times as a kid with my family, but these new adventures contained a thrill that can only be obtained away from parental watch. Out in the wild with my buddies, we experienced freedom, and I again found a place where I could let my imagination run wild. Late at night when the mosquitos buzzed hungrily outside the tent, the cricket symphony reverberated through the trees allowing earth’s acoustics to amplify and blend the music through my mind. A puff of a cigar, a pause. Serenity had evolved in nature’s loving arms.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Bee Scorned

Killer Bees will pursue a target for up to a quarter mile.

            I have a goal in life to reach a state of mind in which I can give blood. It may sound like a trivial goal, but my intense distaste for needles has rendered it nearly impossible for me to have any volume of blood taken from me without a nauseous reaction. One time, I got tested for Mono, and after the doctor took a tiny tube of blood out of my arm, I proceeded to vomit on the doctor and on the floor. More recently I had to be put on oxygen while a doctor was numbing a gash on my head, preparing it for stitches. I don’t do needles.

            Similarly, I don’t do bee stings. The characteristics of a nurse injecting a shot and a bee sting are alarmingly similar—a sharp point puncturing the skin, unwelcome and painful, only a sting from a bee leaves the skin irritated, placing the victim in pain for several minutes afterwards at least. Apart from its needle-like stinger, I know very well that a bee is (although still horrible) relatively harmless. Unless a person is allergic to bee venom, a single sting will only cause a few seconds of unpleasantness, and then the individual will walk away fine. But you never run into just one bee. The little bastards travel in swarms, live in swarms, and attack in swarms. This is where things get scary.

            One of the stories I heard about growing up told of an old farmer. His yard had become overgrown with tall shoots of green weeds, so he cranked up his riding lawn mower, and set out to cut his grass. It was like any other summer mowing day; he sat back and nonchalantly maneuvered the mower pass over pass around the yard, while the machine roared underneath him. The motor itself was extremely loud, so loud that any other sound below the decibel level of the mower could not be heard at all. When the mower obliterated a killer bee hive hidden amongst the weeds, the farmer had no idea about the fatal mistake he had made. You can guess the rest of the story. He was swarmed by thousands of bees and died on the spot.

            I hear these stories and all I can imagine are the hundreds of thousands of sticky prickly legs crawling over every inch of my body; I imagine the dull yet deafening roar of countless buzzers; I imagine the pricks of the venomous needles stabbing and jabbing me until I swell up and pop.

            I think of the utter chaos that must happen inside the brain of the doomed victim.

            Did you know that a swarm of killer bees will chase down a target for up to a quarter of a mile? That’s four hundred meters of hell, unforgiving hell, tearing away at your flesh. Have you ever run a four hundred meter race? It’s considered one of the toughest races in track and field. Now as you round the first curve, have someone throw an angry hive of killer bees at your feet. Good luck.

            Nature has a cruel sense of irony when it comes to bees. These organized stinging machines employ themselves in some of the most docile nature business around, and also the most appreciated. Sometimes when I picture bees, I can see them in an old spotty movie played from an old-fashioned projector—you know, one that noisily clatters and clicks as the film images splash onto a sheet. In this movie, there is a melodious recorder playing a soft tune in the background, as a deep rhythmic voice narrates the process of pollination. The camera pans across a field of electric blue and yellow flowers, slowly zooming in on the cup of a stunning tulip. You don’t see anything at first, but eventually a cute fuzzy bee crawls out, powdered with the flower’s pollen. The bee quickly exits the scene, and the movie continues. Sufjan Steven’s soothing song The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!, a song about the bee’s brother-in-law the wasp, might capture this paradox the best:

Though we have sparred, wrestled and raged

I can tell you, I love him each day

Terrible sting and terrible storm

I can tell you.

            Such peace and serenity surround the pollination of flowers, and such joy and happiness surround the consumption of the honey that is made. How can such a vicious insect be the major player in the most peaceful natural process? I’ll tell you why: It’s all part of their plan. The devious little cretins, how they put on such a grand show! It is a ploy, the bait if you will, to lure unsuspecting victims into their traps.

Homemade Tartar Sauce

When a bee stings, it sends out a pheromone that calls the rest

of the swarm to attack the target.

            During my high school summers, and even now into college, my friends and I made regular trips to camp. Usually we frequented Brownwood State Park where there was a muddy lake that we boated, tubed, and wake-boarded on until our arms dangled defeated by fatigue and our skin blistered red from the angry rays of the sun. We did all of the classic camping activities; we built fires even when there were burn bans (practically every time due to West Texas heat and drought), we hiked through the grounds, we grilled out on the fire, we roasted marshmallows, we told stories late into the night. These trips became an integral part of my group of friend’s relationships. Camping became the place where we connected on deeper levels and experienced life uninhibited by worries and stress. Nature provided a haven of peace, where good friends interacted as God intended. Nature constructed a realm in which we grew and imagined. We felt alive out there and the city couldn’t compare.

            When we didn’t venture out to Lake Brownwood, my friend Kyle had some land past a tiny little town called Santa Anna, which served up the best damn fried catfish and homemade tartar sauce that I’ve ever had. Twenty or so miles outside of Santa Anna, Kyle’s land belonged to Nowhere, and Nowhere greeted us heartily. Upon arriving at the land, we had to drive through about a mile of land owned by another family before we got to Kyle’s gate. The land hadn’t been used in over a year, so the week before a couple of my friends and I had driven up and mowed out a clearing. Inside this gate we found all of the freedom we could ask for. Here, it was only us—myself and a few of my friends and nature, calm, sweet, peaceful nature.

            Something odd happens to a person when they are pitted directly against nature. The body goes into a kind of shock for a few hours. I don’t mean a traumatic kind of shock, the kind that you might associate with PTSD. No, this shock is one of quiet reflectiveness; a tender time to come to terms with your instinctual connections to nature. If you could step outside of yourself during this time, you might see yourself as a parent watching a baby trying to stack the colorful plastic rings on a pole. You might softly chuckle, and glow with pride as you watch yourself trying to text on a phone that doesn’t have any service, knowing that you will soon fully exist outside of a world of wires and beeps.

            And then the shock is over. There’s a reconnecting with the natural world that bore all of us into existence. Then it is time to sit, and enjoy the good company of excellent friends.

Waggle Baby, Waggle Baby

A forager bee will perform a figure-eight dance

to map out directions to the rest of the hive.

            I came across another bee attack story a few years back. It was typical of this deadly genre, if any bee attack can be typical. I reacted with unease, as usual, but there was a detail written in this periodical that made me cringe even more than usual.

The story begins with an old man sitting on a rocking chair on his porch. I can’t remember his exact age, but I would hazard a guess that he was in his mid-to-late seventies. This man rocked peacefully, enjoying the calmness of the evening, the stillness of the air, when a bee flew onto his knee. The man simply swatted the bee away, and forgot about it for a few seconds. The swatted bee released a pheromone calling his hive to attack this man, and within seconds, the poor guy was swarmed. It didn’t take too long, but during the few minutes of torture, the man’s neighbor ran outside to see what the ruckus was all about. When he got to the porch—and this is the detail that disturbed me the most—he saw the man struggling under the weight of the bees. When you take into account that a swarm of bees can contain as many as thirty thousand individual bees, it’s easy to see why the man buckled under the weight.

            Here’s the kicker with bees: it’s not just that they’re terrifying, which they are, but they’re organized. A single pheromone attracts thousands of thousands of more soldiers to the scene. Of course, bees die if they land a sting on you; it rips their stinger out, and death is instantaneous. In this way they remind me of thousands of religious extremists bent on destruction even though they’re not clear on why they’re doing it in the first place.

            Another thing I know about bees is that if one finds a good crop of flowers, or a new place to swarm to make a hive, or even to map out where potential threats are, it does a jig called the waggle dance, which consists of hundreds of figure-eights in specific patterns. The bees watch this like the latest dance move on YouTube. They then reenact it and as one move to that location.

            Forgive me if I am boring you with facts about bees, I am simply trying to justify my phobia of the horrid creatures. I’m talking about thousands of monsters that move as one entity—one intelligent, furious, venomous suicidal entity that will kill you if you cross them. You ask how I know? I can promise it wasn’t just a google search.

The Flight

The Killer Bee is an accidental hybrid of African Honey Bees and European Honey Bees, resulting from a bee-breakout in Brazil.

            My junior year of high school, another one of my good friends named Seth owned some ATVs on his land out in Merkel, Texas. Seth, myself, and three other guys made a trip out there one weekend to chill out and have a good time, like we usually do when we go camping. Besides Seth, none of us had ever been out to this land, so we were excited about scoring a new location to camp out and act rowdy.

            We bought cheap cigars at a gas station, feeling mighty proud since some of us had yet to reach our eighteenth birthday, and drove down a bumpy dirt road to the land. Eventually the road came to an end, forcing us to unpack and trek the rest of the way to our camping spot. We didn’t complain; we were young and strong, excited about toughing it out. Seth’s land was a classic West Texas environment: numerous cactus patches littered the ground, mesquite trees sprouted sparsely here and there, large rocks jutted out of the ground in strange, sharp formations. There seemed to be a narrow, dried out creek bed that snaked its way between our legs, and it was this that we followed for the next couple of miles. Looming ahead of us stood what we Abilene folk would call a “mountain.” In reality it is a hill, or maybe a plateau or a butte, but around these parts, mounds like the one in front of us are the closest you’ll ever get to seeing anything resembling a mountain. We all made a collective mental note to climb it the next day.

            Exhausted, we finally arrived at our camping spot, next to a quagmire of a tank which, for those who are unfamiliar with country lingo, is what we call a man-made pond, usually dug out to water the livestock. As dumb teenage guys do, we had remembered to carry obscene amounts of hamburger meat and weenies and our cigars, but neglected to bring any repellant. We regretted this immensely, but quickly decided that a mosquito had no shot at flying as fast as an ATV can drive, so we quickly hopped aboard and tore off down the dirt roads.

            We rode for hours, and eventually killed the motors to head back to camp to eat. Luckily, a punishing West Texas wind had picked up from the south, rendering any mosquito attacks useless. That night as the wind roared, sending our ridiculously sized bonfire dancing a curious two-step this way and that, and the stars hung above us, we reminisced about whatever it is teenage boys reminisce about and fell asleep deep into the night.

            The following morning, we made good on our mental note to hike the mountain. After a meal of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast, we felt it was high time to scale the hill before we left. Securing our packs with enough water to get us there and back, we allowed our food to digest and set off on our quest. Surprisingly, it was a difficult climb. Though altitude obviously posed no problem, there were no marked paths, and we were forced to trail-blaze our own path with a machete. Even so, we were all cut up from rogue mesquite thorns, with cactus needles sticking out of our shoes. A thick mixture of sweat and dirt coated my arms, and by the time we reached the top, I was out of breath. Gasping, I raised my head and was astounded by the view. Now I beg of you, do not poke fun at a man admiring “Texas beauty.” What I was looking at wasn’t beautiful in that sense, but more of in a sense of vastness. I could see for miles (not surprising due to the lack of a variation in elevation in these parts), the patchwork squares of land coming together in one huge quilt.

            We felt like kings, but by this time our royal breakfast had long since been burned on the hike, and we decided it was time to get off this mountain and head into town. However, we soon discovered that it would be nearly impossible to climb down the way we came up without killing ourselves. We had loosed almost all of the scree that gave us traction on our ascent, giving us no sturdy way to retreat. Puzzled, a search was conducted on the summit to find the best way back down to our tent. In groups of two, we separated and scoured the top. I searched with my buddy Travis. On one of the edges, we came to a precipice overlooking a fifty foot drop to razor sharp rocks below us. I was set on scratching this side off the list, but Travis noticed a depression in the face of the rock wall. Basically, if one dared, it was possible to wedge into this depression and slowly maneuver down by pressing one’s hands and feet against the opposite sides of the depression. Travis decided that he would give it a try, and with a few agile moves he wedged himself in the depression.

            He began to slowly, but successfully, inch the same way down to the bottom, when I noticed that something wasn’t quite right. The peaceful silence, interrupted only by the noise of Travis scraping down the façade of the mountain, gradually faded under a new sound—a faint buzzing. I looked down at Travis, who had his back to me with his arms raised in triumph, and saw his backpack. The original color of green had been replaced with a swirl of black and yellow.

            And then I saw the hive.

            “Travis! Run! There’s fucking bees!”

            Chaos erupted. Nature had betrayed us.

The next few minutes were the most terrifying minutes of my life. I took off like madman, balancing along the edge of the cliff. The faint buzz had turned into a howitzer blast, and before I knew what was happening, I had what felt like hundreds of killer bees pelting me from every possible angle. I threw my backpack off, shrieking like a banshee, allowing a slur of obscenities to rocket out of my mouth that I have not matched since. I could feel the stingers stabbing every exposed part of my body, like the needles that I hate so much. Bees are not like smaller flying insects, and do not die when swatted; no matter how much I slapped and swung, they wouldn’t go down, but instead returned angrier than before. I was going to die, just like those people in the stories I had read about.

The Aftermath

One to two Americans die from killer bee attacks every year.

            As you have guessed I survived my ordeal, and as you have also guessed, I have probably grossly overdramatized my tale. We all made it, and as soon as the bees fell behind, it became a legend among us: The day we survived the killer bees.

            I checked myself and counted thirty-seven stings, eighteen of which were on my face causing it to balloon up. Travis fared even worse, and soon grew nauseous from his wounds. We walked down together to meet up with our other companions, who we realized had no idea what the hell was going on above them. I found my friend Keith crouched behind a bush. Seth described the scene as two maniacs screaming for no reason, blaring cuss word after cuss word, flailing like a couple of escapees from the insane asylum. I imagined what it must have looked like to a bystander observing from a distance, and agreed that his description was probably fairly accurate.

            For a while we laughed at the hilariousness, the kind of humor that arises after a close call. But soon we had to take Travis into town to get some Benadryl, but not until after we got lunch at Dairy Queen. The cool sweetness of a Butterfinger Blizzard washing down the salty heaven of a cheesy burger slid off my tongue, relieving discomfort and exhaustion. The retellings of the adventure had been articulated numerous times, with new details and realizations surfacing with each one. “We were how close to the edge of the cliff?!” “I screamed what combination of curses?!” “Keith, what good was hiding behind a bush going to accomplish??”

            Comedy helped ease the vivid images and emotions into a box that could contain them. Poor Travis. His account of the story still remained to be spoken as he continued to become acquainted with Dairy Queen’s toilet, but better vomit than faltering completely under the weight of a swarm, succumbing to innumerable stings until the mind faded into the oblivion of death. Our escape was a close shave, and we had to admit through the laughter that we had a great deal of luck with us that day. Nature’s loving arms showed us another side of her character, one that demanded respect. I think I received that message loud and clear, and as the sound of another dry-heave emitted from the restroom, I know Travis did.