Epping Bees

I apologise first of all if you are having to read this slower than usual - this is because I am typing one handed, for reasons which will become apparent.

For the past few weeks we have been clearing my wife's maternal grandfathers home and garden, ready for the sale of his house after he decided to go into a retirement home in his declining years. The sale of his house is necessary because having paid taxes all his life and never claiming a bean in benefits, and having bought his own home, and saved up for his retirement, and paid into a pension, he is considered able to pay for his own care, which apparently costs just short of £500 a week. If on the other hand he had been an unemployed welfare dependent drug taking, smoking, drinking, layabout, spendthrift then the state would have paid this for him. But as ever I digress from my main point, which is the sale of the house.

Not knowing how long Grandpa has left, we need to get the best price for his house, to eke out his savings so at least he can stay in the private care home as long as possible, and not end up in a council dog kennel. It would be fair to say that he has let the gardens go somewhat, and that was likely to put off potential buyers. Now Grandpa Jim's has little or no front garden to speak of, just a pathway running round the front of the house and a border with a few shrubs in. To the side is a paved area with rose bushes. These two gardens were quickly brought into order. It was the rear garden that needed much attention.

When Jim moved into the house as a council tenant, being a keen gardener, he negotiated the takeover of a plot of wasteland between his house and the block of flats next door. The council were happy for him to caretake it for a peppercorn rent, and James duly moved the fence, and had a very successful allotment garden for many years. Of course when he came to purchase the house under the right to buy scheme, the council had no boundary plans, and assumed all the land went with the house, and wily James kept his mouth shut until the deal was done, thus adding a size able chunk to his already large garden. The plot would now quite reasonably house a ... well another house to be fair, possibly even two of those modern town houses, which adds nicely to the value of the home. Unfortunately this plot which was fruit trees and vegetables had gone back to nature to a height of a good three foot of brambles and other wild grasses and vegetation which would have made a good Star Trek hostile planet set.

Much cutting and trimming, hacking, slicing, and chopping, and many trips to the council tip with an overladen trailer still left a sizable pile of waste to get rid of. We therefore sensibly decide to raze the plot, figuring a scorched earth policy would clear the area nicely, ready for rotavating and levelling, leaving a blank canvas for the new owners. And so it was whilst raking all the garden debris into a pile to start said bonfire that I accidentally raked over a bees nest.

There are apparently over 2000 species of bees, closely related to wasps and ants, and 260 of these are UK residents. I suspect some are also migrants, and a proportion are asylum seekers. There are tree bees, masonry bees, bumble bees, honey bees, burrowing bees, river bees..... you name an environment, there is a specialist bee to live in it. I know because of what happened next, as I had to read up on bees to sort myself out.

As I raked over the aforementioned nest (not a hive, these were burrowing or tunnelling bees, living underground) my father in law shouted a warning, and at first i thought he had identified these bees as a specialist group from the Essex area immediately outside of London. "Look out, Epping Bees!" I could have sworn he yelled, although in retrospect he may have yelled, "Look out,"F"-ing B's"

The effing bees launched a sharp and swift counter assault as a response to the perceived threat to their burrow. Simultaneously I was stung on my right knee, right inner thigh, right side of my stomach, left upper arm left inner wrist and just above my left eye, right in the lid. These were no the droning bumble bees you might be imagining, like a Halifax Bomber, no these were fighter bees, Spitfires, and bloody quick ones at that. Anyone who doubts that bees communicate with one another or that they don't work in unison should be left in no doubt if they ever suffer a similar attack. this was a well co-ordinated assault in defence of their commune. And I use that word advisably. Bees are Communist by definition, each one serving the greater good of the swarm. By their actions they also prove that they are in fact terrorists - suicide bombers, willing to give up their lives for the cause. This is not actually true - we are brought up to believe that a bee dies after it stings you. Not so. Only two bees die as a result of stinging, the humble bumble, and the honey bee both rupture their abdomens as a result of stinging, as they struggle to get the barbed sting out of the elasticated sting of mammals, the sting having been designed as a defence against other insects with an exo-skeleton. Basically they are badly designed to fight mammals but try anyway, with fatal consequences to themselves. Of all the other bees, not all of which sting, those that are are, are all quite capable of stinging and surviving. They only sting once, as they loose the barb, but it doesn't kill them.

Well it killed these little effers, as I then poured petrol over their nest and set fire to them all along with the remaining garden waste. But by then the damage was done. My left eye swelling nicely is fortunately not to badly affected by the venom, nor is my right leg or even my stomach. My left arm however is a different story - I must have got the full effect of both stings, and boy does it hurt. My arm has swollen badly, I cannot move it without pain, I can't lift or grip anything - the little Effing Bees have immobilised The Stig.

Of course, I have been stung before as a child, but I don't remember it. I simply remember the treatment - vinegar and brown paper, just like Jack and Jill. The problem being we had emptied Grandpas house, and whilst I know that Ketchup contains a fair amount of vinegar that was all that was left in the cupboard that looked even likely to work - and it just didn't. Piriton works on all insect bites and stings, according to the bottle, and we have gallons of the stuff at home for my daughter Emma's allergies. But none in my car.

So here I sit with aching swollen limb and slightly puffy eye, wondering what is the solution to the bee problem. Communist Russia fell partly for economic reasons, but mostly because their countrymen wanted MTV, Cocoa Cola and Levi jeans. I doubt that the same consumer goods are desired by the average worker bee. So how can we get these aggressive little warmongers to come over to the idea of a peaceful co-existence and capitalism? Well reading a little further about the habits of bees it seems we may not have to. Some bees are "solitary." They live alone, or at least independently in a group of other solitary bees. Solitary bees now outnumber swarming bees according to my source, and the weird thing is, whilst solitary bees may live in a swarm like nest, they don't give a bugger about the other bees around them - it's all for one and every bee for himself. in other words, capitalism.

The bees in question, for those interested in that sort of thing, had a black body, with a yellow band at the arse end and a yellow band around the mid body, quite fuzzy looking rather than hairy, and around 20mm long, with a bullet shaped body. I haven't been able to identify them for sure, so for now they will remain the Epping Bees.