Mrs. Campbell’s Bees
I never got too close to Mrs. Campbell’s bees. That was one warning I did not question. And I wasn’t necessarily afraid of honeybees, it was Mrs. Campbell and her honeybees that were so eerie to me. I remember her drifting in and out of the hives with the veil of her beekeeping hat covering her face. I was scared of that scene.
The Campbell’s lived at the end lot of Moundview Drive, just before it hooked and turned into Desha. I can’t remember ever having a conversation with Mrs. Campbell. Her son Tony was a couple of years older than me, and he “made straight A’s” in school. But he rarely left his yard. He didn’t ever once even come close to playing a football game with Terry or Philip, my brother Paul or me.
Terry liked to mess with Tony when he had the chance. One day he asked him, “Hey Tony, how far is it from the earth to the sun?” Tony looked toward the sun, covering his gaze with his raised hand, “it’s about 93 million miles away.”
Terry would keep a straight face until we got out of hearing range. (That wasn’t very long because Tony didn’t stray from a tight perimeter around his yard.) Then he would bust out laughing, “Did you see him squint and look at the sun?! What a dumb-ass!” Terry loved to mess with people but he didn’t tamper with the bee hives either.
My relationship with most stinging, flying insects during my childhood was mainly “seek and destroy”. When we threw stones at giant wasp nests, or shot them with a b.b. gun, it hardly occurred to us how fast wasps can fly and how far they would follow. In my neighborhood, you had to run to survive. Sometimes there was no warning before someone smacked a wasp nest. You just knew to run when they ran.
Somehow we knew that honeybees were “good”, at least to like to think that I thought that way. There were those days in Little League practice when Cairy Craig taught us how to catch bees by pinching their wings behind their back. We would force them to sting our shirts or a leather glove, and then pinch off a wing. The bee was still alive but couldn’t fly or sting. It would just crawl. When one had a number of bees crawling all over one’s arm, it was quite terrifying to some of the other Little League players. Boys do strange things.
Otherwise, honeybees were held in the highest regard. As someone who will scoop up worms from the sidewalk after a rainy day and toss them back to the soil, I can’t imagine harming a honeybee. But after my first year of being a “remote” beekeeper, I have grown to understand that honeybees themselves can be quite cruel to other honeybees. Drone bees are starved and kicked out of the hive when the weather turns cold, for instance.
The truth of it is, I picked up the bees and drove with them in my trunk to Tennessee where my dad had some empty hives waiting. He hung the queen, poured the bees over her and shut the lid. It was an amazing process. But I missed most of the fun stuff. I have only met them 2 or 3 times. There is a lot to learn about taking care of these creatures. And my dad keeps learning. It’s a good thing Mrs. Campbell is not too far away.
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