Bees On My Bonnet

Bees used to land on my head occasionally when I was fully bald. I don’t know why, they just did. Maybe to them my head looked like a giant pink flower. I left them alone too – better to wait for them to get bored and fly away then to try to usher them off and end up with a huge bee-goiter on the top of my head. So I’d sit there stock-still, aware in a weird cellular way of every tiny movement the bee made, or even didn’t make; even if it didn’t move I sat there, jaw clenched, willing myself to impersonate Greek statuary until the thing got bored and flew off.

I’m not fond of bees. They always seem kind of irritated to me, and ever since I wiped out that whole bee colony in the tree I’ve worried that they might be planning some dark, violent insect form of revenge. Stinging me to a swollen pulpy death comes to mind, and for all I know the bees that land on my scalp might be the early scouts of the bee equivalent of the Kido Butai, a thrumming mass of about 10,000 irritated Africanized bees all looking for that biped what done in the Queen (a sort of 10,000 Ronin, if you will).

Today I was outside in the sun, and a bee landed on my head again. But aha, I had a surprise in store for it. My scalp has grown just sufficiently bristly that it no longer presents to bees a smooth, slightly spongy, and inviting landing field. Now my scalp bristles with tiny hairs, insignificant at human scale but veritable Rommelspargel at bee scale. The bee landed, squirmed around for a few seconds as it tried to find a comfortable position amid the bristles, and soon gave up and flew away, irritated. I imagine that when it returned to the hive, its communication-dance read “I found a huge pink flower, but it’s bristly and unpalatable. Sorry, guys.”

But I still keep an eye out for the Kido Butai. You just can’t bee too cautious. Or too eager to spawn a cheap pun.