A gigantic bumble bee flew through an open window into the newsroom where I work Tuesday morning.
Why I mention it is this bee was not the kind of bee you and I are used to running away from. It looked more like a prehistoric bee, a predecessor of the modern one, a sort of mammoth bumble, if you will.
I’m sure it lifted weights in its spare time and when it flew by me at eye level – mine, not its – I distinctly heard it rumble, as if an engine was propelling it through the air.
It turned, looked at me, and said in a very deep, husky voice: “Buzz.”
The last time I saw a winged creature that big it was chasing a mouse along a furrow in a freshly plowed field.
Panic was slow in developing among the half dozen occupants of the chairs in the room, in much the same way people will stand in dazed fascination and watch a tomado’s approach until it’s almost too late to find shelter.
But, after a few swoops, loops and direct dives, the bee had stirred up most of us beyond the everyday levels of fear and worry into terror.
Not the terror of the child who, luckily, can run, scream, cry and hide but the subdued terror of the adult who must pretend to some other feeling, such as concern, “Oh, don’t kill it!”, irritation, “Why do things like this always happen when I’m really busy?”, indifference, “Hasn’t that bee found its way out yet?” and bravado, “Here, let me get it!”
And, of course, in situations such as this, someone must always say, as someone did this time, too: “If you just leave it alone, I’m sure it won’t bother you.”
That bit of deluded human philosophy differs sharply from a favourite saying the bumble bees apparently use: “Bother everybody, especially those who leave you alone.”
I have never gone out of my way to bother bumble bees. I may not like them much, but I do concede they have a right to do whatever it is they were put here to do. I wish them well and hope they’re happy.
They, on the other hand, aren’t the live-and-let-live types. It hasn’t been a good day if they haven’t spread a little misery around.
Like the day one attached itself to the side of my head as I was riding my bike. The day I sat on an old couch behind the house to find out that I was not sitting on a couch at all but on a fancy upholstered beehive with springs, two arms and three cushions.
Then there was the day I sat down on the lawn to enjoy a bottle of pop and put my hand on a bumble bee lounging in the grass.
Back in the office, work soon ceased and the chase began. Rolled up newspapers, phone books and desk-top calendars were brandished and slashed about but the bee deftly missed every attack, like the hero in a video game.
It landed on the handle of a window and summoning more courage than I knew I had, I reached over, opened the window and the bee flew out. But before I could close it again, another bee flew in, bigger and meaner than the first one and I thought, “I can’t believe it. Tag team bees!”
Bee B made Bee A look like a baby bee (say that three times quickly), like a condor next to a canary. This one had come to take prisoners.
It had tattoos and battle scars on its body and a patch over one eye. We might get it but it would take two or three of us down with it.
After much shouting and running about, which I watched from the doorway of an adjoining room, a young male reporter yelled, “Stand back!” and lunging into battle like a medieval knight of old, captured the terrorist bee in a coffee cup.
The bee was given a hurried escort to the front door where, in a flourish of compassion and kindness, it was set free. Last anyone saw of it, it looked a little jumpy and was heading full speed for a restaurant across the street, an obvious victim of coffee nerves.
God must have had fun making the bumble bee, thinking about how it would keep the human race on its toes.
“What the heck’s that?” I’m sure Adam said to Eve, when he saw the first one. “I don’t know,” I bet she replied. “But I’m sure if you just leave it alone it won’t bother you.”
That was the first time Adam shouldn’t have listened to Eve.
©1987 Jim Hagarty
