My sister Susan was deathly allergic to bees. She swelled up
terribly when she was stung, and came close to death several times. Once in the
early 1960s, she was mowing the lawn and ran over a hive of ground-burrowing
bees (yes, there are such things, at least in the Pacific Northwest), and they
stung her all at once, and we had to put her in the bathtub and pack her in ice
to keep her from swelling to death.
Our father was allergic to bees too, but not as badly as
Susan was. Evidently he passed his allergy to poor Susan. None of the rest of
us got the bee-allergy gene.
But I think Susan may have saved my life once.
It’s a very early childhood memory of mine. It was a nice
sunny day, and she and I were sitting on the grass outside our house, playing.
This is rare and memorable in itself, because she usually hated playing with
me. I think we were playing school, or store, or some such thing. Anyway, we were having a very nice time.
And suddenly she grabbed my head and shoved me face-down
into the grass and held me there.
I had no idea what was going on. I thought it was part of
the game, but I was also mildly irritated at her. And, at the same time, I
could hear a peculiar thrilling hum over my head, louder and louder, then
softer again.
It turns out that she saw a swarm of bees suddenly fly out
of a nearby tree and come sailing toward us, only a few feet above the ground.
She grabbed me and pushed me down to protect me, and crouched down herself to
protect herself.
Bees swarm when they’re looking for a new home. They’re not
especially dangerous when they’re swarming, but they generally land on the
first thing they encounter. If that thing had been me at the age of five years,
I would have shrieked and screamed and rolled around, and the bees would have
been – hmm – alarmed.
And I probably would have been in bad shape after that.
Susan also.
But we lived past that day. Susan died in 1995, sadly, of
aggressive ovarian cancer. I’m still here.
But at least the bees didn’t get us.
