This past May a tropical bee flew into our new house in Sri Racha. My wife attacked the flying insect with a broom. My two year-old son Fenway screamed at the buzzing creature. I rolled up yesterday’s Bangkok Post and tracked the invader's flight. My first swat caught the zigzaging bee and it caromed off the wall to finish its life on the tiled floor. Mam swept the bee from the house and I brandished the newspaper in triumph.
"Bad man. Not kill bee. Bee good for flower. Bee good for nature. No bee."
"No flower." My son was smarter than me, because as Buddhists my wife and children venerated all living things, but this was not my first encounter with bees.
In the summer of 1960 my family moved from Maine to a suburban tract south of Boston in the Blue Hills. The neighborhood was located on the site of an abandoned army base. Bulldozers had razed the remaining derelict military installations to create half-acre plots for the new suburbs. Their ruins provided shady shelter for dozens of bee hives and their scouts swarmed over the flower bed of the neighborhood gardens. My mother considered any creature larger than an ant an animal and throughout June and July her screams filled our split-level ranch house. The mothers of our enclave confronted the developer. The farmer by the highway said that the bees helped grow flowers. The mothers had been brought up in the city. They wanted the bees gone and by the end of August the bulldozers had eradicated most of the nests.
The onslaught had forced the bees into a small gully filled with fruit crates. The narrow defile was located behind our house. Bees swarmed around our crab apple tree. My sister cried herself to sleep and my mother screamed at the sight of them.
A week before school my older brother, next neighbor, Chuckie, and I decided to exterminate the remaining threat and left our garage with snow shovels, wearing towels around our heads as protection. My youngest sister accompanied our expedition swathed in her baby blanket.
The four of us stood at the edge of the gully. The sizzle of bees resonated in the air like a flock of mini-motorcycles. My brother was 8. Chuckie and I were 7. My younger sister was barely 4. Frank was elected captain. We were his privates. His strategy was simple.
"Don't bees make honey?" my sister pleaded their case.
"Yes, they do," I liked honey.
"So no bees, no honey?"
"No." I saw her logic.
Not Chuckie.
"I like sugar and bees have nothing to do with sugar."
“Smash everything.” My older brother motioned for my sister to back away from us, as we descended into the pit with the shovels raised above our heads. The first crate splintered under the first assault, but the bees instantly congealed into an angry tornado seeking our flesh.
“Run," My brother shouted in terror.
We dropped the shovels and ran across the lawn toward safety of our house.
I looked over my shoulder.
My sister was frozen to the spot and the bees bit her a dozen times in the space of time that it took for my older brother to rescue her from the swarm. Bumps rose from her skin. She cried in our arms, as we took her back into the house.
My mother was furious with us, but more so with the developer and the next morning a bulldozer buried the gully with earth. We didn’t see a bee after that day, although my older brother and I swore that the ground vibrated with the buzz of the buried bees.
As we reached puberty, the danger of the bees was softened by our parents’ mystical interpretation of the birds and bees. None of their explanations made any sense to us, because none of it was supposed to make any sense. Sex was a forbidden subject in the suburbs of the 1960s. Later that summer I asked my father what 'the birds and bees' really meant. He had attended a good college in Maine.
“‘All nature seems at work … The bees are stirring–birds are on the wing … and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.' That’s from the poet Samuel Coleridge. Now do you understand?” The tone of my father’s voice excluded any answer other than one.
“Yes, sir.” I had no idea who Samuel Coleridge was, but I would have bet my allowance that he had never been bit by a bee.
Several years later Chuckie and I found a stash of moldy porno magazines in the woods. In the photos of naked men and women the people looked dirty like they had never taken a bath and Chuckie said, "Sex has nothing to do with the birds and bees."
"I know." I was hurt, thinking that my father might have lied to me, then realized that he had said nothing at all.
"Then again I'm not so sure." Chuckie pointed to the man's erect penis and said, “Maybe that’s a man's stinger.”
“And the woman is the egg?” I asked under my voice, for while we were over a mile from my house, but I was certain, that my mother could hear everything I said anywhere.
“I guess so.” Chuckie was stumped by my question and that evening I fell asleep that night to dreams of the birds and bees in strange positions. My Boy Scout Handbook had warned about ‘nocturnal emissions’, so in the morning I knew that the wetness inside my pajamas wasn’t pee and that I had taken step closer to being a man.
Te next summer there were no flowers in my neighborhood and bees disappeared from my existence until the spring of 1971
I attended Boston College as a commuter student. My trip to Chestnut Hill began with a trolley ride from Lower Mills along the Neponset River to Ashmont, where the T ran to Park Street.
One morning the trolley entered the station and an inbound train was waiting at the platform. The driver was walking to the head car and I jumped off the trolley with my token in hand. I dropped my fare in the slot. As I ran to the nearest car something flew into my mouth.
It was a bee and it bit the roof of my roof.
I screamed out in pain and my tongue swished at my tormentor. I danced in a swirl, until the bee released its barb and I spit it out of my mouthHaving long hair most of the other passengers on the platform feared that I was having a bad acid trip and hurried into the train. I pointed to the bee, but black and yellow attacker flew away before anyone saw it. My explanation of the bee bite through a swollen mouth only scared the passengers more.
Lightning supposedly never strikes the same place twice, yet later that evening I was walking through Chinatown, when something flew up the leg of my jeans. It was a bee. The instant it stun my calf, I slapped at my jeans and the bee dropped to the sidewalk.
My attacker looked amazingly like the bee from Ashmont and I wasn’t giving the creature another chance to kill me, so I stomped the bee into a smear on the concrete.
Upon returning home and checked out the old gully. The moon was up and the grass shone silver under the light reflected by the moon. I laid my ear to the ground. It was silent.
At the breakfast table I related this tale to my younger sister and asked, "You remember the time the bees attacked you?"
"No." She was almost 13, which was a difficult age for all teenagers.
"The bees stung you over and over."
"Why?"
"Mom wanted them gone."
And she left it up to you?" laughed my sister. "Junior bee-killers. You know they make honey?"
"Yes, I do."
I surrendered to her recollection of the past, however I was certain that this day’s bee was a descendant of those hives' queen. It had to have family and they had sought their revenge. I expected nothing less from the birds and bees, because in the words of Samuel Coleridge, “The bees are stirring–birds are on the wing.”
I think I understand now.
Maybe one day my son Fenway will understand the mystery of the birds and the bees.
Something about it has to be the truth and Fenway would find the answer.
All men do in the end.
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