5 Million Bees – The Weird Side of the Internet

5 Million Bees – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I ain’t scared of much. Probably death, I think drowning is up there. If you’ve ever seen me, you might imagine I’m not afraid of Diabetes or heart disease, and despite appearances, they scare me too. But one thing I’m truly afraid of is bees.

I was maybe three or four, you know the first time you start remembering things? That’s how old I was. And we were living in a second floor apartment in Rensselaer. And my mother and father, being it was the late seventies, thought nothing of watching the TV movie The Swarm while I sat unawares on the couch.

Terrified. And I wouldn’t be that terrified again until, also sitting on the couch, my parents introduced me to the nuclear holocaust film The Day After.

But bees. I remember walking onto a hive in the woods on the ground ans running away as fast as I could while one of them stung me inside my ear.

I’m telling you my life story for a reason. Imagine five million bees. That’s what fell out of a truck in Burlington, Ontario. A beekeeper showed up and said it was the craziest cloud of bees he’d ever seen. So I wonder if he was an experienced beekeeper, right? How many other clouds has he seen to say this one was crazy. Crazy compare to the “Honey Stomp of 1996” crazy, or compared to the “couple bees that make me wait to get into my car” crazy?

Really, it was like a hundred beehives. And people were told to keep their windows rolled up, which is like telling people not to eat the box the pizza comes in. And would they even be able to get the bees back, like are they like honed in to the queen and they’ll return, or are they about to start ruining everybody’s picnics in Burlington, Ontario?

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