If I drill down into my deepest fears, I’ll come across things like the (always classic) “abandonment” or something physical like “drowning” or something dark like “being the victim of a crime.”
But the first thing that pops into my head if you ask me what I fear?
Bees.
Holy crap, I’m scared of bees.
And it’s not that I don’t understand their role in ecosystems or that I don’t love the taste of honey or that I don’t think they’re one of Nature’s Most Neato Insects.
I get all of that, and yay, go bees.
They just happen to make me want to crawl out of my skin and, well…. flail skinlessly about.
My years and years of working with children eventually taught me to deal appropriately with all manner of insects.
One cannot show fear in front of the little ones if you don’t want them to go absolutely batshit when say, a junebug bounces off their head, or a huge horsefly lands on their leg.
But bees? Never quite got there.
My first memories of bee terror involve family trips in our orange VW Rabbit on the Alaska Highway. We’d have all the windows down to keep us cool in the heat of summer, and inevitably, a bee would fly in to buzz and bump around the back of the car.
The back of the car where I sat.
Now, as anyone who fears bees knows, everyone always gives the same advice when one of our fuzzy pals is nearby: “Don’t make it mad. Don’t swat at it. It will go away if you leave it alone.”
However, when the force of wind isn’t allowing said bee to fly anywhere but around the back window of the car and it’s starting to get pissed off that it can’t escape, this is absolute crap logic. Or so I thought.
As soon as anything that MIGHT be a bee flew in the window, I would immediately begin to wave my arms and scream and try to crawl into the front seat, where my father was trying to drive. Have you ever tried to drive with a four year old on your head?
My mother would then ardently seek out a tissue or a napkin to hand back to my brother. It would be his job to “catch” the bee, since the sheer volume of my wailing was not something anyone could endure for very long.
Including the bee, who would come at me every few seconds as if to say, “Shh! Shhh!”
Which would make me scream about twice as loudly.
Eventually my brother would catch the bee, or it would fly out, or our dog would eat it (what?) and I would sit making post-cry noises for about half an hour while my father watched me encouragingly in the rearview mirror and my mother said cheerful things like, “Well, we’re all fine, aren’t we?” or “He doesn’t want to hurt you.”
She knew I didn’t believe her.
But we all play our parts.
The second major bee moment — though all moments involving bees are major — occurred when my crazy grandfather decided to start raising bees on their acreage in Edmonton.
I couldn’t BELIEVE it… I mean, did he want me to avoid their home forever? Did he want me to FEAR BEING AROUND HIM?
No. He just wanted some honey and other healthy bee items. But I took it as a personal insult.
Since his hives were situated at the end of their long driveway, I would force all my family members to roll up their windows when we went past them. Then I would sprint from the car to the house when my dad parked.
My grandfather would try again and again to convince me how lovely and peaceful his bees were, but I was having none of it. How did he know that there were no killer bees loitering in the combs? How did he know that they weren’t plotting to turn on him?
Eventually he gave up on trying to convince me. Especially after the random day that all the bees came and sat on the front window of the house while we were eating dinner.
Which probably took about ten years off my heart.
The final significant bee moment of my childhood happened in a classroom in the seventh grade, when my French teacher was showing us how to conjugate the verb “sourdre.”
As we worked through our vocabulary assignment on that fateful day, I leaned over to my friend in the next desk to ask what “sourdre” actually meant. That’s when I noticed that she looked distressed. And then I noticed WHY she looked distressed.
She had a bee on her eye.
Not on her actual eye, mind you, but climbing along her eyelid. And it was no small bee, no way.
A HUGE BEE ON HER EYE.
And it doesn’t stop there, oh no. There was also a bee on her nose.
TRYING TO CLIMB UP HER NOSE.
But wait — there’s more!
SHE HAD A BEE ON HER MOUTH.
TRYING TO GET IN HER MOUTH.
To this day, I have no idea why the hell a small murder of bees had gone to every potential cavity of my friend’s face to try and climb in and eat her brain, but it was TOO MUCH FOR ME TO HANDLE.
Now, I’d dealt with bees in classrooms many times before, shifting nervously (but silently) in my seat to keep track of the bee’s whereabouts until it flew back out the window or went to lurk in the hallway. And I felt instinctively that it was important to keep the true character of my terror under wraps. After all, I didn’t want to look like a complete pansy in front of my friends.
But this was insanity.
“MR. D. MR. D.” I had to summon my teacher for assistance, but I didn’t want to sound panicked. So I said his name in a calm tone. Really loudly. Twice.
“In French, s’il vous plait!”
“MONSIEUR D, SHE HAS BEES ON HER FACE.” Again, calm yet authoritative. Although not in French.
“Well, wave them off.”
Did he not know how DANGEROUS that could be? Did he want the bees to EAT HER FACE? Or worse, STING HER BRAIN?
“I DON’T THINK WE SHOULD.”
By this point, all the girls were making various low-grade freakout noises while the guys tried to get up close to see what the bees might do. All the boys except for one, mind you, who feared bees but was trying to pretend that his French assignment came first.
Mr. D, realizing that things had quickly spiraled out of control, came back to her desk to wave at her face. But when he got there, he realized that the nose bee was totally heading for her sinuses.
“Whoops, that’s odd. Okay. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to breathe out through your nose in a short little blast… knock him off his pins a bit.” This seemed like a half-decent idea, but she hadn’t actually INHALED in about ten minutes, so she had nothing to give.
He waved at the bee on her eye, and it climbed onto her eyelashes, navigating them like a rickety suspension bridge.
All the girls screamed.
The mouth bee looked a bit frustrated, since her lips were pressed so tightly together that they’d turned into a white line. So he went to her other nostril to check out the action.
We screamed again.
Someone started to cry.
The boys waved their binders near her head, hoping to create a breeze that would send the bees flying. Instead, this strategy led to a binder fight that spilled joyfully out into the hallway while Mr. D tried desperately to rid her of the swarm.
Nothing was working, though, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I went outside into the hallway (past the throng of boys beating on one another with their Trapper Keepers) and ran to get Mr. P, the vice principal.
I have no idea why I did this. It seems oddly reactionary to me even now, but I think I figured the bees might respond better to someone further up the school hierarchy.
The office ladies took one look at my tear-stained face and buzzed Mr. P to come right out. I couldn’t even really explain to him what was wrong, but instead took off down the hallway. He trailed close behind.
The first thing he saw was the rapidly-growing binder riot, which I knew would distract him. So I yelled, “NO, NOT THAT” and ran into the classroom. He was reluctant to leave the boys to their own devices, but to his credit, he followed me in to find Mr. D poking at her nose with a pencil. And a roomful of sobbing girls. And one boy, trembling in the corner.
“What’s going on?”
“Weirdest thing. All these bees landed on her face and won’t get off. Everyone’s going kind of nuts.”
Mr. P went straight to work. “Are you allergic to bee stings, dear?”
A nearly imperceptible head shake.
“Okay, then. Has one stung you yet?”
His use of “yet” let to a small series of tiny shrieks. He was not dissuaded. He moved right in and peered closely at the bees.
“Wow, that one’s really big.”
A single tear flowed down her face, which seemed to distract the eye bee. He followed the tear down, and then something happened that none of us could really fathom in the moment, nor for years to follow.
Mr. P grabbed the bees.
PING! off her cheek. PING! off her nose. All three at once. Courage personified. And risky.
But he pinched her nose a bit in the process, which led her to believe she’d been stung. She screamed, and we all began to wail in terror. Then we ran out into the hallway, where the boys came at us with their binders, having bloodied one another enough to need new victims.
Between the shrieking and the beating and the wailing and the profound panic in the air, no one paid any attention to the fact that Mr. P had squished the bees and was smacking his hands off, out the classroom window.
Unstung.
Mr. D comforted the victim and sent her to the pop machine with 50 cents to get herself a 7-Up. Mr. P came out and hauled some of the boys down to the office, while ordering the rest of us back into the classroom.
I still don’t know what “sourdre” means.