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Smoking Bees: Shortbread's Light Bite

Published 10 months ago

Despite the heavy rain clouds descending upon Shortbread HQ, a very brave bee has buzzed his way in to my office and has unknowingly inspired today’s Light Bite. 

Smoking Bees by Davey Spens

The man from next-door came round to tell me they were coming over his fence. I hadn’t paid them much attention, but I’d noticed their numbers were bigger each time I did the washing-up. The weather had cooled in the last few weeks. The iced tea and lemonade sat still in the fridge. Ice cream advertisements had passed on the baton to porridge oats and winter soups. The weather girl was back in jackets. September.

“They were swarming round the furniture,” he said, folding down the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt, “We were having our gin and tonics, and one buzzed down Margaret’s top.”

My neighbour was standing on the welcome mat in a wool fleece and summer shorts, socks inside his sandals like a true Anglo-Saxon.

“I thought I heard a noise,” I said, searching his face to find his name, “I just assumed they’d go away. They can’t be making honey in my cavity walls.”

He threw a dirty look down the side of my house to a small round hole, drilled into the house brick, from which they came and went.

I was on watch that night. We work a forty-two hour week, over a rotating shift pattern of two days, two nights then four days off. Nine o’ clock to six in the morning, six o’ clock to nine.

“Do bees hibernate in winter?” I asked Jim, who was building a playing card house. Jim wasn’t much older than me but he had a head like my mother’s handbag. He could always find something useful to say, though you wondered how much junk he carried about. There had to be something up there about bees. He placed two queens together and a couple of jacks either side.

“Bees don’t hibernate. I think I read somewhere that they cluster in a ball, and rotate so they take it in turns to go outside.”

“Like firemen,” I said.

Tim tried a third layer but the roof wouldn’t stay up.

“They’d be rubbish firemen. They go to pieces in smoke.”

We spent most of our time in the common room, waiting for the fire bell. You never knew when it would come, some days it never did.

“How do you know all this stuff about bees?”

“There’s a book up on the shelf,” he said.

PG Tips and darts, Gavin and Stacy, and ring doughnuts. I used to wonder why there are so many more police dramas than fire service ones. Whether it’s an interest in crimes over accidents or just that watching firemen brush up on their table football wouldn’t hold an audience beyond the first ad break. But how many police forces get to star in sexy calendars? The room had a bar and a pool table, an assortment of comfy chairs, like a sixth form common room crossed with a sailing club. Strip lights, pine paneling and old Formica tables.

Behind the door was the library. It wasn’t an actual library, little thought or organisation had gone into it. But amongst the Stephen Kings, John Grishams and sports biographies was a tatty-spine - Practical Bee Keeping and Honey Production by Donald T. MacFie.

“I don’t want to keep them,” I said, scanning the contents - The Modern Beehive, Rearing Queens, Marketing Honey. I made a face at Jim, but his nose was in a crossword.

“Ten letters,” he said, “digital vice.”

“Pornography?”

“That’s eleven.”

There didn’t seem to be anything about pest extermination. I looked in the index at the back for entries on death, killing, or otherwise. There was half of a page on killing jars, which made for interesting reading. But I didn’t eat enough peanut butter to wipe out an entire colony.

“Arithmetic?” said Jim.

He wasn’t really after my help, just calling the words aloud. There was a chapter on smoke and smoking bees, with a series of illustrations. When smoke enters a hive the bees are immediately diverted to eat as much honey as possible as there may be a need to abandon the hive at a moment's notice.

“Television?”

Bees are woodland insects and evolution has taught them to fear fire more than anything else. When bees smell smoke, they start eating their honey, and become drowsy and too full to move. It masks the smell of pheromone that warns other bees of trouble. The result, mass confusion.

“Fingerhold,” he said, “Finger-hold.”

And then the fire bell went.

The call came in before ten o’ clock, when a passer-by saw smoke. By the time our engine arrived, the farmyard was swarming with people. Some of them were farm labourers, others drinkers from the nearby pub, none seemingly perturbed by the soft bangs of tyres exploding and the louder ones of petrol cans. The sky was acrid with smoke and the animals were shouting. The blazing barn where the fire began housed tractors and propane gas canisters. Five metres away, a hundred pigs charged from one end of a shed to the other and hurled themselves at the metal sheeting as smoke sucked in through the vents. In less than half an hour, flames were licking up through the first barn roof and smoke came in through the second.

“Get behind the cordon,” I yelled, driving spectators back upwards of fifty, sixty or seventy metres. The lure of fire. What is it that turns us back into boys? They stumbled with red faces and sweat beading on their brows, some reasonably co-operative, others with drunken scowls.

“Get back!” I shouted at a kid, who tried to skirt around me. He pretended not to hear. I grabbed the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and gripped him hard enough. He was wasted like the other. The gas cylinders inside could explode without a warning, and each of the tractors in the barn was a ticking petrol bomb. I glowered at him and he hated me back.

“Go to bed!” I said, “Go on!”

Eight of us in breathing apparatus tackled the blaze, my hose trained on the canisters in an attempt to avert an explosion. We had two jets on the pigs and Jim had one to make sure the fire didn’t spread through the roof. The sheeting came down in pieces and we had to fight from behind cover to make sure we kept things damp. It wouldn’t abate. Further men were held back from reaching us because of the number of kids who flocked to the scene in their cars and bikes. The policemen cleared the single-track but cars became stuck at the side and had to be pushed clear before more engines could arrive. We left at four o’ clock. One crew stayed on overnight.

I performed the same rituals coming home. I’d go straight to the kitchen, boil the kettle, and sit on the counter top. If we’d been called out, I’d have the TV on to unwind. If not, I’d go straight up to bed. But this morning it was different. I brought the bee book home with me, and opened it up to where I’d left off. A page about handling bees at night. I thought about the boy who wouldn’t go behind the cordon as I wandered outside my house. The sky was a blushing pink and the grass was damp. I lay on my belly on the wet grass lawn and watched the little hole in the brickwork. As the sun peeked up over the fence behind, it breathed on the entrance to the sleepy nest, and as I watched, something stirred. Six little furry legs peeked out into the air, giddy, as if drunken or waking. Her black and yellow body beat a dozy pair of wings. And with the weediest of buzzes, in the warm light of the summer sun, she lifted off her launch pad and flew off to her shift, going out in search of something she was unsure she would find.

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