A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [134]
Twice, though, I have been stung while collecting swarms. Once was nothing but an accident, the other was my fault. Bees often swarm high in trees. This makes sense, because when they leave their old home, they rarely have yet a new one in mind. So they hang, from a bush, rock, eave, tree limb, until scouts find a suitable new cavity they can call home. If they're going to cluster for a couple of days, and not sting much in the meantime, I can see why they would gravitate toward the tops of trees: less predation. Often I've found myself shinnying up a pine, heavy canvas bag stuck into my waistband. The problem comes after I've got bees in the bag. For obvious reasons I no longer want to put the opening inside my pants. But only rarely have I been able to climb down one-handed, so I took to clamping the top of the bag between my teeth. This worked beautifully every time but once, when I accidentally bit down on a bee, who, understandably enough, stung me on the inside of my upper lip. It's hard to swear with a canvas bag of bees between your front teeth.
The other time was stupid on my part, and unforgivably rude. The bees taught me a painful lesson in return. The swarm was about sixty feet up a pine. The tree's lowest branch was twelve feet up, so I propped a ladder next to the tree. I started climbing, and when I reached the swarm, I saw the bees were six or seven feet out, at the end of a limb probably three inches in diameter: too small for me to crawl on. I climbed back down, and stapled two long, slender pieces of wood to the lip of the bag. I climbed back up, carrying this contraption, plus another long piece of wood: I would hold the two pieces in one hand, and position the open end of the bag beneath the swarm while I used the other to scrape bees off the bough and into the bag. Good idea, I thought, except how was I going to keep myself from falling? I left the equipment in the tree, climbed back down, got a rope, returned to my perch, wrapped the rope several times around the tree's trunk and my own, tied it off, and began to scrape. It didn't work. I tried for a couple of hours before I came up with an even worse idea: I would saw off the limb and allow it to crash to the ground. Sensing themselves falling, the bees would break their cluster and reform, I hoped at a place more conducive to their capture. Down again for the saw, and back up. The limb cracked, tore, and fell, right onto the next limb down, about five feet below. The bees remained clustered. I climbed down, tied myself in, and patiently began again to scrape away. I'd been working less than ten minutes when the bees finally lost patience. The whole time I'd been in the tree, bees had been flying about my head, seemingly more curious than anything, but suddenly they decided they'd had enough. Their mood turned angry, and in that one moment I had scores of bees burrowing into my hair, stinging my scalp, with more bees stinging my face and hands (because pine bark is rough I'd worn long pants and long sleeves). I started to climb down, only to realize I was tied to the tree. For one instant I pictured myself hanging there, dead of bee stings. I'd had catastrophes before, where bees suddenly turned angry and stung me forty, fifty, eighty times, but always before I could get away. I pushed hard against the rope, and because I'm terrible at tying knots the rope loosened enough for me to shimmy out. More bees in my hair, on my eyebrows, in my nose, on my eyelids. I pushed out from the tree and did a controlled fall, slapping my arms and legs against whatever limbs came my way to slow myself enough that when I hit the ground I wouldn't break a leg. I landed, rolled, and ran for the house. Inside, I turned on the water in the bathtub, cold and hard, and, moaning, put my head underneath.
After turning off the water, I began to pull soaked bees from my hair, and to scrape stingers from my scalp. Now that I was no longer in danger, I discovered I had a headache.
It didn't