A few posts ago (here), I made a reference to my brother and I fighting an entire bee hive. Well today, I’d like to expand on our stupidity. But before I get into it, let me set up the wilderness (house) we lived in. Not only did we have the bee hive in our front yard, that is the subject of today’s discussion, but there was also another one forming in our chimney. Ants were also a huge problem, and I often came home to my entire kitchen moving and pulsating. Plus, we had a skunk problem- It sprayed the entire inside of our house through the screen door when our dog decided to bark at it. That was a fun couple of weeks. Nothing like going to school and being the skunk kid in class. Even my lunches tasted like skunk. And lastly, the lizard problem. Or at least I think they were lizards. To this day, I’ve never seen a reptile that has four legs, but also slithers. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I still see it…
Sorry I’m rambling, back to the story. It was a summer day, and we were outside playing in the front yard. I was 10 and my brother was 8. My sister was 5, playing in the house. I was “manning” the house, with our parents at work. This “us being left alone” thing only got worse as we got older, not better. Couch fires, mud wrestling parties, and police involvement would only increase during high school. But those are for other posts. That day we were being innocent, for the most part. Chris, my brother, had on roller blades and I didn’t. I’m pretty sure I was convincing him to jump over things.
Except we couldn’t help but notice how many bees were around that day. It started to interfere with our fun time. Instead of moving to the backyard, we decided to investigate and noticed a giant beehive in our ivy. Now our ivy was surrounded by a rock garden (pile of white quartz rocks, spread out to cover the weeds). After we had found our problem, it was just a matter of disposing it.
We started with some distance attacks- light hose action. Water would spray the hive and bees would fly out. But nothing major, because we were too far away. This was fun for about five minutes until we got bored and upped our attack. We moved to rock throwing. Now at this point the bees were definitely getting angry, and we started to get a little hint of “this is a bad idea”. As Chris was the extreme one, I dared him to finish it off. It was boulder time. He hobbled over on his roller blades with the giant rock, and threw it down on the hive. Then suddenly the sky became black, and I no longer saw the sun. The bees were upon us.
Me being farther away, and not on roller blades, I was able to run to the back of the house. Bees were in my shirt, in my shorts, and in my socks. But despite all that, I managed to escape with only 7-8 bee stings. I made it into the back of the house, and slammed the door. Chris on the other hand, had been engulfed. He tripped and fell 3-4 times trying to skate on the rocks, and ended up army crawling to the front door, being stung the entire time. He banged on the front door in agony to be let in. But my sister being taught never to open the door to strangers, politely kept asking- “Who is it?” Weirdly Chris, wasn’t able to say, “Oh it is I sister, please let me in. I would ever so appreciate it.” When I realized what was happening I opened the door and dragged him in like it was a war zone. He had been stung more times than I could count. He wasn’t even crying, he was just moaning. Which is saying a lot when your eight.
Now this was before every one had cell phones, so we just waited until mom got home. She did three hours later, to find our wounded bodies covered in ice packs. She almost had a heart attack. When my dad came home later that night, he had trouble even comprehending. He was speechless. The positive of it all though, was that we found out we weren’t allergic to bees. The negative being that it hurt to put on clothes for a while. My brother complained the following morning that he was still getting stung. My mom and I thought he was obviously delirious from the stings. But then when he took a shower, three dead bees fell out of his hair. What can I say? We were smart kids.
