Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2004-07-29 - 9:22 a.m.

Bees of Evil

I just got stung by a bee. First time in years. Lil fuckers! I'm not giving them good press any more. I'm all the time saying how bees won't bother you if you don't, blah blah, well, you can forget THAT. Bees are evil and they will hurt you. Owwwwww! My instep!

Those are MY tomatoes, said the little red hen. I weeded (not very well) and turned the soil (better) and planted them and watered them and damnit, I am going to HARVEST them, bees bedamned. Bees can be in the mint, which is where they all were, but the mint encroached on the only path to the tomatoes, and I don't know WHAT happened but it really the hell hurt.

I trotted back the other way, out of the bees, removing the stinger and cursing (okay, I was barefoot - see "those are MY tomatoes.") Then I peeked cautiously over the top of the ornamental fence to see what the hell had happened to my quiet little tomato patch, which is apparently now infested with full-blossom MINT plants and all their furry little pollinating bastards. They are ALL over. Mint and the Evil Insects. But at least while peeking I got to see one of the little freaks fly straight into a major Spider Condominium and get all goofed up, and I got to see the spider run in and do sticky battle - go SPIDER - and when the bee fought loose it only fell six inches into the NEXT spider villa, waking that inhabitant, who was the day's winner. Dinner! I'm not normally affectionate with spiders, and I know that wasn't the bee that nailed me (yes, I know they die after stinging, but it's no comfort - I didn't want to cause a bee-death, I only wanted my frickin' TOMATOES. MY tomatoes, mine mine mine; bees don't even LIKE tomatoes. We could have co-existed, see? I didn't start this thing, THEY did) but I still felt a little kinship for the skinny-legged guy. He got dinner. I didn't get dinner. Dinner is based on tomatoes. Not just as a minor little side thing you could leave out, but an entire pasta dish predicated on having garden tomatoes, which I do have, but I don't have ACCESS to, kind of like if the IRS has frozen my tomato account. AND my foot hurts.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. I don't want you to think I exaggerate, on these pages. My foot doesn't really hurt any more. It hurt when I got stung, and about five seconds later it REALLLY REALLY hurt like WHAT THE HELL MY FOOT IS ON FIRE MUST CUT IT OFF IMMEDIATELY, but it doesn't hurt now. It's not like a codeine-requiring wound. I have a welt, though. A WELT. That's just wrong, little bee. I feel violated.

Now don't go writing to tell me I have the bees to thank for my tomatoes, I KNOW that. They have ME and my lousy weeding to thank for their mint, and I don't recall getting any little engraved thank-you cards prior to the vicious attack on my instep. And don't go writing to tell me that I probably stepped on him and he was only defending himself, either, because you don't know what that bee was doing on or around the time of the unprovoked violence. I'm voting that he was keeping an eye out for unsuspecting chumps with empty vegetable baskets, while wiping his little butt back and forth on a whetstone.

I'm going out there to get my damn tomatoes, right here right now. I'm going to leave this screen up, so that if I don't come back, you can call the men in the white jackets and the hats with the veils and the smoker-thingies to come fish me out of the mint patch. I'll be the thing that looks like a giant welt.

All right. I'm back, WITH tomatoes. I put my eyeglasses on first, which might have helped the first time around, and I put on my big green Birkenstock gardening clogs, which may not protect my feet but can intimidate through sheer ugliness, and went out and did battle. I edged through the worst of the mint, and then picked carefully and quickly, especially after it occurred to me that most of the mint was below knee-level and I was wearing a short denim skirt; I leave the imagining to you. It did speed me up, though. And now I have tomatoes for the Silver Palate Summer Linguini dish.

The basil's in the front yard. No mint out there. At least, there wasn't yesterday.

Bees are evil and they want to hurt you. Tell your kids you were wrong.

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