Bees

Happy B Day to ME, Happy B day to ME! 63 years old and I am still up about it today. Of course it is only 7am and I have been up a whole 2 hours. Even went out this morning and treated myself to breakfast and it is raining so I might just take the whole day OFF. Whew! I don’t think I have ever taken the whole day off for my Birthday. I think it is about time!

This morning, as I was enjoying breakfast out, I got to thinking about something to blog about and then it hit me. Bee’s were the answer. It has rained off and on all last month here and there really aren’t any Bee’s to speak off. That’s a good thing unless you think of the poor flowers that need pollinating. On with the story.

Years ago, when I was first a building contractor, I had built a house for us and had a couple of others under construction. As a fill in project, my crew was building a playhouse in my backyard that was for my daughter and her new friends. Needless to day, as fill in projects go, this one also got out of hand and a very elaborate home was being constructed and it was costing me a fortune. My daughter was in the 2nd grade and every afternoon her and her friends were in the house enjoying it. The house sat on a high part of the yard and was surrounded by large rocks to give it even more height. My wife had planted flowers throughout the rocks and the crew had and I had built a really neat slide that weaved among the rocks and started up at the playhouse and went on down to the yard. When we finished, I tested the slide out and as I was flying down, my left arm hit one of the rocks and I split my elbow open. We decided no more adults on the slide. What an undertaking this was. Anything for my little girl. Well, the playhouse did not have air conditioning so the windows had to be opened to keep it cool. My daughter was inside and a Bee flew in. She was deathly afraid of Bee’s and as a result she never entered the playhouse again!

About 20 years later I was building a mansion, for a customer up in the Berkshires, with a rather involved landscaping requirement of 300,000 shrubs, trees and plants. After we were done with all of the initial planting it required crew of 7 or 8 just to maintain the plantings. My daughter was on the crew. I watched 3 them deadhead one day and as I looked I noticed my daughter was pulling the heads off of expired plants and crawling all over her hands and arms were dozens of bees all looking for nectar. I said I couldn’t believe that this was the same girl that was afraid of the bee in her playhouse. She said she has never been stung, as you just had to work without sudden, quick motions. About a week later, as we were cleaning our back yard pool, a bee came to bother us and I swatted it with my baseball cap but I swatted it into her and it stung her and she said "Thats not so bad". Her first bee sting. I thought back to the playhouse and wondered if I had knocked a bee into her back then maybe she would have played in it????

It is now 11 am and I didn’t get the day off.