Yesterday a tropical bee flew into our new house in Sriracha. Mam attacked the flying insect with a broom. My two year-old son Fenway screamed at the little creature. I rolled up the front section of yesterday’s Bangkok Post and tracked the bee’s flight. My first swat caught the buzzing bee on a zag and the invader caromed off the wall to finish its life on the tiled floor. Mam swept the bee from the house and I brandished the newspaper in triumph.

TV never replaced the newspaper for swatting flies and neither will the computer.

This was not my first combat with bees.

In the summer of 1960 my family moved from Maine to a suburban tract south of Boston in the Blue Hills. The neighborhood was located on the site of an abandoned army base. My Uncle Jack had been processed here for the Korean War. Bulldozers razed the remaining derelict military installations and the ruins provided shelter for dozens of bee hives. Their scouts swarmed over the newly planted flower bed of our house and those of our neighbors. My mother considered any creature larger than an ant an animal and throughout June and July our split-level was filled with her screams.

By August the bulldozers had eradicated most the the nest. The bees retreated to a small gully filled with fruit crates. It was right behind our house. A constant danger to anyone walking outside.

My older brother, our next neighbor, Chuckie, and I decided to exterminate the threat and left our garage with snow shovels over our shovels. We wore towels around our heads as protection. My youngest sister accompanied our expedition.

Our grandmother had been a nurse in World War I. My sister had aspiration for the same profession. She was in last year’s Halloween costume. A very cute four year-old nurse.

The four of us stood at the edge of the gully. The buzz of the bees resonated in the air like a flock of mini-motorcycles. My brother was 8. Chuckie and I were 7. He was the captain. We were privates. His strategy was simple.

“Smash everything.” He motioned for my sister to retreat to a safe distance. She backed away from us and we descended into the pit with the shovels raised above our heads. The first crate splintered under our assault. The bees swirled into a tornado of anger before seeking our flesh.

“Run.” My brother shouted in terror, as the bees defended their hive. We dropped the shovels and ran across the lawn toward our house. My sister stood her ground. The bees went for the easy target. She was bitten a dozen times in the space of time that it took for my brother to rescue her from the swarm.

My mother was furious with us, but more so with the developer and the next morning a bulldozer filled the gully with earth. I didn’t see a bee after that day, although my brother and I swore that the ground vibrated with the buzzing of the buried bees.

The danger of the bees was softened by our parents’ mystical interpretation of the birds and bees. None of it made any sense to us and none was supposed to make any sense. Sex was a forbidden subject in the suburbs. I asked my father what it really meant. He had attended a good college in Maine.

“‘All nature seems at work … The bees are stirring–birds are on the wing … and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. That’s from Samuel Coleridge. Now do you understand?” The tone of my father’s voice excluded any answer other than one.

“Yes, sir.”

Several years later Chuckie and I found a stash of moldy porno magazines in the woods. The photos of naked men and women were devoid of of birds and bees. Chuckie pointed to a man’s erect penis.

“That’s his stinger.”

“And the woman is the egg?” I asked under my voice. We were over a mile from my house, but I was scared my mother could hear everything I said anywhere. She had good hearing despite her small ears.

“I guess so.” Chuckie was stumped and we fell asleep that night to dreams of the birds and bees. My Boy Scout Handbook had warned about ‘nocturnal emissions’, so I knew that the wetness inside my pajamas wasn’t pee. I was one step closer to being a man.

Bees disappeared from my existence until I was much older.

19.

I was attending Boston College. A commuter student. The trip to Chestnut Hill began with a trolley ride from Lower Mills to Ashmont. The trolley stopped inside the terminal and I ran to catch the Boston-bound train. Something flew into my mouth.

A bee.

It bit the roof of my roof. I screamed out in pain and my tongue swished at my tormentor. The bee released its barb and spit it out of my mouth like I was a crazy man in a fit. Having long hair most of the other passengers on the platform feared that I was having a bad acid trip. I pointed to the bee, but black and yellow attacker flew away before anyone saw it. My explanation of the bee bite through a swollen mouth only made the passengers avoid me more.

Lightning supposedly never strikes the same place, yet later that evening I was in Chinatown. Something came up the leg of my jeans. A bee and it stun my calf. I slapped at my jeans and the bee dropped to the sidewalk. It looked amazingly like the bee from Ashmont and I wasn’t giving it another chance to kill me. I stomped the bee out of this existence.

An hour I returned home passing the old gully. The moon was up and the grass shone silver under the reflected light of the sun. I laid my ear to the ground. It was silent, but in my mind I was sure that day’s bee was a descendant of those hives. It had to have family and they would seek their revenge.

I expected nothing less from the birds in bees.