Bumblebee

 

Late last night when I brought the hellhounds back through the cottage door from our final brief hurtle there was a Loud Buzzing Noise.  Noooooo, I thought.  It’s just a VERY LARGE HOUSE FLY.

Wrong.  But it wasn’t a thumb-sized wasp.  It was a thumb-sized bumblebee.

I don’t kill bees.  I did in my younger, bloodthirsty, violently-allergic-to-everything days and in America where everything that buzzes and wears yellow and black is totally out to get you and will leap out of the shrubbery and pursue you, fizzing like a short fuse that is about to blow you away.  Honey was nice and all, but I hated bees as much as I hated anything else that if it stung me I’d blow up like a gigantic red rubber balloon and which occasionally threatened to stop me breathing too.*  Just for laughs.  Laughs are harder when you can’t breathe.

But then I moved to England where bees are a lot mellower.  They still sting, but you have to really annoy them first.**  The bumbles in particular are amazingly laid back.  I’ve inadvertently put my hand on a bumblebee more than once—they’re also kind of slow—and haven’t been stung yet, although I don’t care to push this.  But I don’t find something to do on the other side of the garden if I find myself sharing space with a bumblebee:  which in the cottage garden is a good thing, since bumblebees like it and it’s a small garden.  Three bumblebees and it’s full.

Anyway.  I had a bumblebee in the house last night.  Neither of us was happy.  I chased her around with a glass and a piece of cardboard for a while but she wouldn’t settle.  Eventually she Disappeared into the Shadows of the Sitting Room and I let her.

I assumed she wouldn’t sting me as I slept and she didn’t.†  I looked around a little cautiously this morning but I didn’t see her—maybe she was stunned by the frelling heat too.  And then as I was ringing Peter to discuss the day ahead. . . .

I love foxgloves, but the basic mid-pink ones take over if you let them.  Pink of course is good, but the really startling dark raspberry pink ones are rare—unless you go to a garden centre and buy them which in foxglove country seems to me kind of cheating.  Or anyway part of the fun to me is seeing where the silly things manage to come up—foxgloves seed like anything around here, and this includes in cracks in the pavement and among the houseleeks and in three-inch pots containing mini geraniums.  But I like the whites, or the very very very pale pink, with the dark maroon spots in their throats.  Back at the old house I selected for these by pulling up all the mid-pinks—white will make a decent go of it if you give them some edge.  By the time we left we had lots of splendid white—and some mid-pink since they don’t breed true.  Which is fine.  I wouldn’t want to obliterate  . . . pink.

I can’t perform this harsh selection process at the cottage;  the garden’s too small and there are still only two or three whites a year.  I like a proper foxglove forest and we’re getting there, at the cottage, but the pinks predominate.  So I compromise and pull out most of the mid-pinks when the last flowers are coming out, and before they have a chance to set seed.  And then I put the foxglove tip with its final few inches of flowerets in a vase indoors—waste not want not.

So I had just rung Peter this morning when . . . my overnight visitor†† emerged from seclusion and crawled into one of the foxglove flowerets.†††  I put the phone down hastily, snatched up the vase and took it outdoors.  With its passenger.

Yaay. ‡

* * *

* I carried an epipen for years.  I’ve told you at least some of this before.  My last damaging encounter with Things That Sting was in that delirious week between Peter coming to visit me in Maine and his ringing me up a week later which is when we decided to get married.  It’s possible that being Off the Planet had enough physical effect that I didn’t react as badly as I might have—or as I expected to.  I hadn’t quite stepped on the nest, chiefly because they were already coming after me, and I turned and fled—running into the fellow I was with, but only I got stung.  I swelled up some and wheezed a little—and started carrying an epipen again.

** Although I’ll still never make a beekeeper.  Beekeepers do get stung even if maybe not as often as the population at large believes^ and I don’t want to press this post-menopause allergy-truce thing too far.

^ Right, Ajlr and abigailmm?

† She was probably hiding in the kindling basket with the dog food [sic] and whimpering to herself:  if I get out of this alive I’ll never go out after dark again!  —I hope she likes cedar oil.  I won’t use proprietary moth killer stuff so the sitting room, the attic and the cupboard in my bedroom kind of reek with cedar oil.   The attic contains all my wool clothing, the cupboard in my bedroom contains (most of) my YARN STASH.  I don’t know why the sitting room is so popular with clothes moths.  Maybe they like dog food.

†† Luke and Andraste and the others are at Third House.

††† I like to think of her flying hopelessly through this alien landscape—not realising that the giant with the clear columnar prison and the shingle has her best interests at heart—and catching sight of the foxglove.  My prayers are answered!, she cries and hurtles toward it.

‡ I’d like to say something about always having a foxglove in a vase after this—I’m nearly there with the necessary level of foxglove forest and they last quite a while in a vase—but bees, I’ve read, specialise.  And there’s a limit to how many bee-motel options I could have lined up on the kitchen table.^

^ Peter was faintly cranky when he rang me back, almost immediately, to say accusingly, that was you, wasn’t it?  I know, I know, I put the phone down after only about three rings, I said.  But there was this bee. . . .