Thursday, June 04, 2009

if you're looking for a pet to protect your home, forget the watchdog. go with bees.

bees are environmentally-friendly. the decrease in bee population is having adverse effects on crops, as well as other plants and animals. why not do your bit to make the world a greener, more sweet-smelling place? your local green activists will admire you and everyone prefers honey to a snarling pit bull, so your neighbours will be happy.

bees are also effective. they can strike out in all directions at once, taking down a whole army of trespassers while your dog is off chasing the neighbourhood cat, and they're much less susceptible to kicks and gunshot wounds. besides, bees eat flowers, not nasty pedigree, and you don't have to pick up their poop.

my dad and I went for a walk the other day. we climbed up into the blueberry fields across the bay.


it was lovely. halfway up the hill, we rounded a corner and came upon a cluster of white boxes. "oh, look!" exclaimed my dad. "honeybees!" we could hear the loud droning from fifty feet away.


then, all of a sudden, it wasn't fifty feet away anymore. we started running and they started following. see how I took that picture looking downhill towards the boxes? we ran around the boxes and stopped on the path above them. I took a picture. then we turned around and saw another group of boxes ahead of us. then I got stung. then bees flew into my hair. they were buzzing around and I couldn't get them out, so I wailed, "DADDY!" and he came and saved me with his comb.


we decided to take the long way around to get home. we both got stung, both still like honey, and would both be firmly deterred from trespassing on any property guarded by honeybees, no matter how lusciously dilapidated the property was. I was flinching from imagined bees all day.

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