My friend Trevor and I have a bit of a thing about ‘peril’.
In our modern, relatively well-ordered lives, peril comes as an optional extra with which to colour leisure time, be it as it may that our kind of peril tends to be pretty low-register stuff: swans hissing at our passing canoe, for example, or playing a recovery shot knowing that the ball might come off a tree and into your face. It’s not the South-West face of Everest, I’ll grant you, but it keeps us out of mischief.
I had a little bit more peril than I was looking for on Saturday afternoon, and was assaulted by one of my bee colonies when I was trying to put a valve between the brood box and the super, as a prelude to taking some honey yesterday. One moment, I was just a bloke in a veil doing some rustic care and maintenance, and the next I was being attacked from all sides. In two minutes, I was stung more times than I have been in the entire four years that I’ve been keeping the little sods. There are twelve little puncture holes in my body today that weren’t there before, where twelve consignments of apitoxin were delivered into my unsuspecting bloodstream. Great for the arthritic joints, not so good for anything else.
Much as I would like you to feel sorry for me, please spare those thoughts for the twelve bees, whose abdomens will have been partially ripped out as they flew away, and who will all have died pretty soon after.
No, what interests me now is not that it happened- (basically, I was stupid and they were angry), but how I actually felt, then and there, about the temporary but total loss of control. 70% of my brain was trying to cope with a situation with a variable, and possibly bad, ending, where my jeans had been coated with hundreds of bees, more and more of whom were heading up the trouser leg to inflict further damage. On the periphery, there was a loud and uncomfortable whining noise (note: angry bees don’t buzz) of an all-out attack on my veil, my chest, my legs and my dignity, and a vague feeling of unease that there were possibly 40,000 more of them making their way out of the open hive whilst all this was going on. Occasional stabs of pain indicated that they weren’t playing around, and that my simply not having a plan B was no longer a viable option. I actually needed to do something different.
But you will have already worked out that 100 less 70 leaves 30, and that the bit of my brain that was not occupied in trying to get myself out of harm must, by definition, have been doing something different. And it was. Curiously, what it was doing was enjoying itself. Some evolutionary instinct was revelling in the fact that I had been presented with a real and immediate problem that needed a real and immediate solution. It doesn’t happen too often, and it is good to test yourself when it does. And to my surprise, the more vicious the attack, the more deliberately and effectively my brain thought through its options, and subsequent plan. 1. Stop what you are doing. 2. Calmly put the hive back together again. 3 Walk, OK run, away to a place of relative safety. 4. Deal with the diminishing number of bees chasing you. 5. Don’t involve anyone else (like Caroline weeding the veggie patch) because she has no protection at all. Then, and only then, take the kit off, climb into the shower and see if you are still breathing.
Other than a slight medical hitch 24 hours later, it is all now consigned to the anecdote box, with no permanent damage done, not to me at least. I need to get back on the metaphorical horse this evening and have another go, as the problem I was trying to sort won’t have gone away, however much me and the bees would like it to have.
Wish me luck.
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